This is totally the sort of thing I am interested in. The story itself beautiful but very sad, I was in tears by the end.
You may also want to look at this:
http://jeffelson.e-monsite.com/
It's a chatbot and one skinned in a way that would probably appeal to many here but it's also got a pretty decent learning capacity for a free chatbot. Most notably it will attempt to generate its own sentences after some time by going over the existing conversation and combining things that it thinks are related. The results vary from quite appropriate to hilarious.
I think it has some kind of mood system but the documentation is spotty and in French and this is basically an Alpha version.
The source code isn't up at the moment but you can edit the database the controls a lot of the brain itself. The included file is actually half in French still and making some translations and fixing up the thesaurus helps.
The bot is nearly empty headed at the moment and the only good way to fill these things out is to talk to them. I can clean-up and post my version (Woo for year of French in high school) if people want but I'm going to want to see your results in return.
Between this thread and the mention I head of PyBrain (
http://lemmasoft.renai.us/forums/viewto ... it=PyBrain) I'm liking the more coding bent topics are taking around here.
@TrickWithAKnife, it's more than just randomness. It's building whole sentences from a multi-part logic based on mood and context. So it's doing two more things, tracking states and building sentences from templates. It's not particularly computationally impressive or ground breaking but it's actually treating the topic seriously. Frankly with the state of the industry I'm surprised and impressed you're doing basic randomness.
I don't hate KNs but I have fairly high standards for them, as I do traditional books. And at least KNs have the intellectual honesty to think of themselves as books, in contrast to bad "RPGs" where you play a mini-game to advance a story that you have absolutely no control over. Interactivity and open-endedness are just inherently appealing to me.
Frankly I can point to games from the 80s that made more dynamic use of dialog than most of todays. Technology isn't what's hold this area back, good ideas on how to implement it and get people interested in it are.