The Interrogative 3 Editor in all of its glory!
Okay, most of its glory. I finally settled on a color scheme for the editor, and after moving a few things around (and a few things yet to be moved), the editor is in a state good enough to show off. Take a look!
Almost done…
There’s one tab not shown here, which is the Dialog Template Editor tab. It’s not yet done. It should be by after GDC, but right now getting things ready for the demo is taking priority. Suffice it to say, it will allow you to customize your Dialog Templates in many ways, and create sets that allow you to have multiple speech styles for your NPCs.
- Dashboard: This is, by default, where you land when you open up the Interrogative 3 Editor. You get one-click access to the manual, tutorials, options, and at-a-glance stats for your game world data.
- NPC Editor: Here, you can create, edit, and delete NPCs, and view all of the attributes you’ve attached to them, as well as assign them knowledge of the game world. Double-clicking on the values in the Data Value column will being up a procedurally-formatted GUI (which you can specify to a large degree when creating custom attributes).
- Attribute Value Editor: This is a sample of the customized GUI that gets shown for editing an NPC’s personality traits. Each attribute has a format associated with it (defaulting to a text box, if you don’t want to specify any when creating new attributes) that determines what controls get shown.
- NPC Summary Tab: The vagueness of personality traits can sometimes make you wonder about what kind of NPC you’re creating. I’ve made this handy-dandy tab so that you can compare your NPC’s traits against some common pen and paper RPG alignment systems, as well as other measurements of NPC personality likelihoods, such as forgiveness, rendering aid, becoming angry, sad, etc.
- NPC Template Editor: Aside from being able to assign about 40 pre-made personality trait templates to your NPC, you can also create your own! Move the sliders, average in other templates’ values, and many other handy functions make tailoring your NPC templates a breeze!
- Knowledge Editor: If the NPC Editor is the brains of the operation, this is the library of information you throw at it! Create and edit objects, add attributes, and set knowledge levels at the object or attribute level to partition your information. Then, load your NPC into the editor and assign the knowledge to them so they can talk about it (or use the information in other ways- it’s your data, after all).
- Testing Tab: Once you have information and an NPC with access to it, you can test out conversations in the Testing Tab. A graphical conversation constructor makes testing queries and statements easy, and you can even talk to multiple NPCs at a single time.
That’s all for now!
Next Blog: More dev shots- likely of the Dialog Template Editor, Attribute Editor, and some sample conversations (in gif form, I hope!). And maybe some shots of the demo (which is a lot like the conversations in the Testing Tab, but the NPCs are little sprites in robes- who don’t like little sprites in robes?).
