Talk it out...or not.

Big content update for this one!

We've added new music, a pair of new characters, and lots of new dialogue. The bridge sequence, our big climactic act three showdown, has finally been written and implemented! 

There are now more than 600 lines of dialogue possible on the Bridge, with dozens of dialogue options and several different ways things can shake out. Will you try to blackmail the pilot into turning the ship? Or will you take a bribe from the Captain to stay quiet? Maybe you found an override code along the way and can simply off them both and take matters into your own hands...

Initial attempts at writing this sequence did not go well. Allowing the conversation to balloon at an exponential pace simply wasn’t scalable, and to top it off, we needed to be able to interrupt the flow of the conversation when the player draws the gun, shoots it, kills someone, and so on, while still being able to have some control over the flow of information. After a few months of circling around the problem, I admitted that some amount of structure was needed. In the end, I devised three general strategies one might take to get their desired outcome in this scene: convincing the captain and/or pilot that you must turn the ship through evidence, blackmailing the captain and/or pilot into turning the ship or letting you in on their dealings (and thus not turning the ship), or muscling your way through with threats and/or acts of violence. I then compared these strategies against three possible levels of tension in the scene which are triggered as follows: tier one is the base, tier two is activated when the gun is drawn, and tier three is activated when the gun is fired. The result of this breakdown, and thinking the intersections through to their conclusions in this scene looked like this.

The argument/tension matrix

Once I began writing the scene, I realized that as soon as a character is killed, we have to abandon the rest of the dialogue and follow a unique flow as it would otherwise be difficult to make sure a character wasn’t speaking from beyond the grave (something that happened a lot before adding this structure). The result is that there are really two levels of tension, one at the start, and the second when the gun has been pulled or shot non-lethally. Being able to understand the dynamics of the conversation based on this matrix made formatting the conversation flowchart much easier. The only two overall strategies that don’t work are to threaten violence without proving your capacity to enact it, and enacting violence too readily before trying to win over your opponents with logic. Mapping this out to a flowchart was the next step, and that chart can be seen here.

The bridge scene’s high-level flow chart

On a similar note to the matrix further up, we’ve largely abandoned nodes for tension level three (seen in red here). The difference in tension between pulling the gun and firing it without hitting anyone, though substantial, didn’t really feel like it warranted writing up to three versions of the same beat in the conversation. In the end, even the tension level two conditions are only really used in situations where it felt like the presence of the gun couldn’t be ignored, as in the following instance. Here we see the player taking the option of accusing the pilot and captain of stealing meal rations. There is no evidence in the game supporting this accusation, and if you haven't pulled the gun at this point, the jig is up. If you have pulled the gun, however, the captain does not take action against you, and instead we move the conversation along a little further.

Excerpt from the game’s script showing logic for changing the flow based on tension

In the end, despite all the structure I just outlined, the conversation still seems to flow organically, moving from topic to topic until things come to a head. The resulting conversation tree is below.

The story graph for Brinkmanship’s final scene on the ship’s bridge.

While things changed quite a bit from the flowchart to this final graph, creating a handful of rules proved to be the key in executing on this massive task.

Hope you have fun exploring all the updates!