I once played a demo VN like this called "The Dolls' Stories" where the player could type responses to the doll characters' questions in a textbox. How it worked was that the game picked up "key words" needed to answer each question and had the dolls respond accordingly if you typed it in correctly.
(You can view the original lemmasoft thread for it here. I recommend you play it yourself to get a sense what what I experienced/felt like: viewtopic.php?t=17876)
It was a cool concept, but one thing I noticed that it was very easy to break immersion into the game. Reasons being 1) you could type the most beautiful, well-thought out sentences to your Doll, but if it didn't have the key word it in you'd just be told to try again and 2) you could be lazy and literally type in one word answers in lowercase as long as it was what the game was looking for.
I ended up doing 2 because I just could not get the right combination of words to make the game "advance," so what started out as an extremely cool, immersive story where I really "felt" like the protagonist turned into a cheap keyboard banging session. I still like the demo and look back on it fondly (I played it waaaay back in 2012), but the execution could've used more work. If you can perfect that with this project you're doing, I'd love to check it out.
Anyway, I've been playing around a bit with natural language processing and thought it could potentially be fun to create a visual novel in which you type to the character who then responds from a script of pre-determined responses based on what you type into a field.
(e.g. the character might say, "It's a lovely day we've been having!" and if you type in, "Yes it is." she'll respond with something like "I really love going on picnics on days like this when the sun is shining! Would you want to go on with me?" Alternately if you say, "No, it isn't." she'll respond with, "I'm sorry to hear that. I guess I'll plan on having the picnic on another day..." or if you respond with nonsense like, "Garbanzo beans are delicious!" she'll say something like, "That didn't sound like anything to me...sometimes I feel like I'm never going to understand you." and either continue with the story or ask you for an additional response.)
My hope was that, given long enough, I could turn this into a game. (e.g. you slowly unveil a story as you talk more and more to this character.)
Anyway, my question was whether this is the kind of game anyone might want to play. It seems like it could be a lot of effort for the player (certainly it's easier to choose a pre-scripted response than it is to type one out), but then it could also be really immersive. (You can literally tell the character anything.)
So thoughts as to whether this would be "fun" game for a player or incredibly annoying? Is this something you might be interested in playing around with?
MADNESS OF DOCTOR DEKKER Is one of my most favorite engaging experiences I've ever played
verysunshine wrote: ↑Fri Jan 17, 2020 8:48 pm
I kind of made a conversation-based game. I didn't have any experience with natural language processing or text processing, so my project did not turn out well. It mainly used if statements to control where to go.
Event[0] revolves almost entirely around text processing for its gameplay.
I have a made in code in the cookbook, you can check it out, it also guides step by step. It made by me anyway.
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