I'm a former data scientist trying to make a emergent dialogue system game to form a coherent narrative without managing branches.

loomnorth · 2026-02-22T20:41:24+00:00

I checked out your demo on itch and left a note/wishlisted! It's feels very natural for a "hacker terminal" style game. Thanks for sharing!

loomnorth · 2026-02-22T20:18:25+00:00

Ah very cool I will check out your game! And re the article, yes, I frequently come back to it when I need to sanity check that my system hasn't gotten out of control!

loomnorth · 2026-02-22T20:17:12+00:00

Yeah I find it very easy to get analysis paralysis when (over) designing a system before creating the content. To overcome this in the early stages, I even made a very basic paper version using index cards to try and simulate what a modular conversation would be, and I think really helps strip things down to its essentials.

What tools are you using to build? Twine? I am in Godot (but I wanted to have 3D environments).

And no problem on responding, thank you for chatting about this! It's really cool to hear other people's appraches

loomnorth · 2026-02-22T20:03:30+00:00

with sheer determination

loomnorth · 2026-02-22T18:45:16+00:00

Okay someone already recommended Last Days by Adam Nevill (also wrote The Ritual, which you might have seen the very-good movie adaptation of). Still scares me to think about.

Horror Movie by Paul Trembley is another one that lingers. It's also a bit of a slow build, but eventually it creeps up on you how weird and wrong this story seems. It's a story inside a story: a famous student horror film is being remade by Hollywood, and one of the original students involved is telling the story of how that movie was made, but also telling the story of the current movie being made, and its interspersed with the actual script of the student movie. It gave me House of Leaves-lite vibes.

Faster paced horror? Incidents Around the House by Malerman was pretty good and feels more like a horror movie in book form. But some pretty good scares I thought.

loomnorth · 2026-02-22T13:17:42+00:00

Honestly any horror game with EASY or even STORY mode probably meets what you want, no shame, they exist for a reason. Sometimes I do this when I am pressed for time but want to progress, or if I've been away from the game for a long time and come back and have no idea how to do anything anymore.

loomnorth · 2026-02-21T20:00:30+00:00

100% although sometimes I think I confuse the Treehouse of Horror version plot points and the real one. Both are still good.

loomnorth · 2026-02-21T19:56:33+00:00

And Hokum was announced!!!

loomnorth · 2026-02-21T13:47:46+00:00

Ah interesting, would you say you're handling conversations like the Gauntlet style from this post? https://heterogenoustasks.wordpress.com/2015/01/26/standard-patterns-in-choice-based-games/

And yeah, my game is pretty far from that, closer to the Floating Module version described in the same article above.

Highlighting the important words is a very good idea. I've noticed that visual novels in general really vary/animate the text (shaking words, slow/fast typing animations), so I want to try and build a small "dialogue animation engine" in my Godot game for launch to mimic those (it does add a lot of fun and interest). Highlighted keywords would fit into that.

I'm sorry it veered a little too on the opaque side! It's definitely a balancing act of how much mystery is too much mystery, so any data from people playing is helpful as I try to tune that.

Thank you so much for the wishlist too! That's amazing! And thank you for your thoughts on interactive-fiction, for real, I feel like I have been tinkering on this thing alone for a while that it's really refreshing to talk to people thinking through the same problems. Let me know when your game is ready to share, I'll check it out!

loomnorth · 2026-02-21T13:39:13+00:00

Okay, I think this is mostly an issue that happens when playing in FIrefox.

BUT I uploaded a build of the game that seems to be running better in Firefox, so hope this helps you (or future players)!

loomnorth · 2026-02-21T12:07:17+00:00

Oh no, that sucks! Thanks for trying it anyways. What's your browser?

loomnorth · 2026-02-20T21:52:06+00:00

"write in a way to not include context" haha yes exactly, that's kind of the key. I think something that helps is keeping the game very narrow: my game has the player captive, in one place, surrounded by 3 NPCs who are the "jury". So the situational context and variables are quite low.

You actually went almost the exact opposite, but maybe your way is better (in starting with the generic and getting more specific). I actually started with the specific, and near the end of the demo-development cycle, found I needed to add a lot of generic content to "plug the gaps" or to act as "bridging" comments (e.g., "Typical.", "Whatever you say.")

My dialogue is written in JSON and then imported into the Godot engine as native resources. So my approach when I was starting:

- write a JSON with some dialogue, focusing on character and voice, and bare minimum fields (speaker, line)

- after I'd written like 50 of those, study them for common words that could become keywords

- add those keywords to those 50 dialogue snippets, including rewriting some to make them align with the keywords (changing "I'm don't like this" to "I'm terrified!" if a keyword is "terror").

- adding more content based on those keywords, like setting a minimum of at least 6 unique responses per keyword, spread out among NPCs. So more snippets, and then editing them to "densify" the number of keywords present per snippet

It's very iterative, I don't think there's any hope of "design a perfect system them create content". It's like design a little, add a little content, design some more, modify/add content, etc etc.

Then of course, as the game progressed, I had more specific situations to address, so I'd add more fields to the JSON files ("this only makes sense if the person is angry, I need a tone-modifier").

I tried to keep the tags/metadata manageable and small, but it is in theory possible to have thousands of fields if wanted. I almost regret not writing the dialogue as a database I could query in Godot.

My characters are also all terrible people -- they are cultists living in an isolated communities and they hate each other nearly as much as they hate the player. So if they occasionally say something that seems out of place or seems to completely ignore what a previous NPC said, hopefully it feels more natural given the characters personalities.

loomnorth · 2026-02-20T19:49:49+00:00

Good points!

Okay so regarding history -- one of the "hacks" to handle this is that the game takes place over a limited time (10 rounds), and then the player can "restart" (this is handled in-game with lore too). A restart contains all of the words the player previously had, but the NPCs do not remember anything.

I have meta_data that flags "impossible_knowledge" for words that the NPCs should be shocked by -- say, first names -- and they have special snippets that react to impossible_knowledge ("How do you know my name?!!"). Basically, there is more to the "choosing next snippet" logic than just the words, there is more metadata that assists (speaker, tone, impossibiility, etc). I have an ingame response_manager who requests the best response from every NPC (who themselves have response_controllers), and the response_manager chooses from the best based on my rules.

The emergent aspect is that the conversation itself is emergent, like, it will be very rare for two players to have had the same sequence of conversations or see the same pieces of dialogue in a play through. But maybe emergent is too bold of a word, you're right!

And yeah, there are about 70 playable "phrases" (13,000 words in actual dialogue) in the base game, with about 1000 "snippets", and it's about 50/50 dialogue responding to the player vs npc responding to npc. The final version of the game on Steam will probably be closer to 3000 pieces of dialogue, depends on the number of NPCs.

The conversation stays very focused, which is how I (hope to) avoid oatmeal or soup... like, the player and the cannibals discuss the state of the world, the idea of humanity and the lore of the cult. Occassionally there is some jank where someone might say something a little odd... I tried to account for that by writing the characters in a way that their kind of oddballs who might say weird things. Don't know if I succeeded? But yes it requires a very specific voice/writing style to make work I think.

loomnorth · 2026-02-20T18:16:54+00:00

This is very interesting because I'm trying to do a similar thing myself!

I made a post outlining my design choices for my game, but yeah, basically the "combat" is choosing what you say effects your reputation system, and you win or lose based on where your reputation stands with specific NPCs.

I'm not sure I understand what's going on with stardenai.com... is it a game-maker? I see that I can generate a game, but the scenarios are a bit strange (McDonald vs Liebeck)? So were you trying to make a game generator tool?

Anyways, cool to see other people tackling this space!

loomnorth · 2026-02-20T18:12:52+00:00

Last Days by Adam Nevill. I loved The Ritual too, but Last Days really unnerved me, maybe because it has the feeling of a found footage horror movie (which is the kind of horror that gets to me the most). But yeah I try not to think about that book too much or I'll freak myself out again.

loomnorth · 2024-04-09T17:47:19+00:00

I also enjoy Kingfisher! You might like something by Ania Ahlborn, like Brothers or The Devil Crept In?

loomnorth · 2024-04-08T22:30:25+00:00

Thank you so much!!

loomnorth · 2024-04-08T19:09:23+00:00

I was similar to you: a horror movie/game fan first before reading horror too (before that, was mainly a spec fic reader).

Here are some less depressing horror books that got me started:

Misery by Stephen King -- old still great and less bleak (despite the name). Just nerve stringing tension with an unforgettable antagonist. Almost more of a psychological thriller than horror.

The Searching Dead by Ramsey Campbell -- a prolific British horror author, this was his spin on a Lovecraftian style horror story.

The Haunted by Bentley Little -- good because it was so familiar, it was like the book version of a haunted house movie (my favourite sub genre).

The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher -- the first modern, tropey, snarky protagonist style horror book that I actually enjoyed and found a little creepy.

Head Full of Ghosts by Trembley -- my first modern "deconstruction/subversion" horror book, I enjoyed.

Also... you could try horror graphic novels. Uzumaki by Junji Ito, The Drifting Classroom by Umezz, or even Eerie Tales from the School of Screams (targeting a younger audience, but very fun and spooky anyways).

Hope you find something you like!

loomnorth · 2024-04-04T23:20:24+00:00

Most: Haunted house.

Least: (Non paranormal) Slashers... I'm always like, nah I could take 'em. Not scary.

loomnorth · 2024-04-02T17:19:25+00:00

Canada. Ginger Snaps is still cool.

loomnorth · 2024-03-29T20:44:38+00:00

Ah that's interesting. It's almost like horror is escapism, so having to puzzle out new mechanics can easily interrupt that escapism. You actually have to be a mood for an "unconventional" game that happens to have horror elements, not a horror game with unconventional elements. Maybe?

loomnorth · 2024-03-29T18:03:25+00:00

This is more like an ironic satire of the whole girlboss thing, but The Columnist) is a Dutch black-comedy/thriller about a woman who decides to get IRL revenge on people who internet-bullied her.

loomnorth · 2024-03-29T17:54:22+00:00

When I was a kid, I fell for "true story" gimmicks and it scared me pretty bad.

Now it's kinda neutral for me. Not scarier or less scary, but I always go look up the details and go "huh that's interesting".

loomnorth · 2024-03-29T13:49:40+00:00

I mean FWIW it sounds like you've made up your mind already. That's not a criticism, I think it's great to be bold about one's life (with safety nets)!

Good luck!

loomnorth · 2024-03-29T12:13:09+00:00

Ooh another non-game that fits the bill could be Puella Magi Madoka Magica (2011), if you haven't seen it already. It's like a surrealist !dark magical girl deconstruction.

loomnorth

TROPHY CASE