More about Topics

Hello dear followers, and today we're going to take a closer look at Blanche Biche's founding concept, the conversation topics!

I was always bothered by the fact that, in a traditional visual novel, you are only prompted with a few more-or-less obvious choices at key moments. Granted, we're in a video game and it's scripted at some point, so you can't just do whatever you want and expect it to react dynamically to your behavior—however, the tracks don't need to be so reidiculously apparent either. So, I thought, what if, instead of choosing between two or three circumstantial responses, you had a permanent list of a dozen of options? Some of them may do nothing at times, but you couldn't know a priori, at best you could speculate using your brain.

That's the main idea behind the conversation topics—to get the player to think and make decisions based on the relevance of each topic in each situation. Forget about binary choices and just imagine that, whenever asked for a reaction, you can come up with any of the many conversation topics you have unlocked so far. If you're trying to keep a secret and a girl is being nosy, you may want to deviate the conversation to topics which have nothing to do with it. Conversely, if you think the girl is hiding something from you, you can beat around the bush, trying to get her to spit it out. The thing is, whatever you're hoping to achieve, you have a big number of options to do so, and it's up to you which is the best pick at that moment.

So you might say, okay, it's all very nice, but in the end, it's just a fancy way of choosing between a set number of routes.

But it gets better.

In my post about the Tone Wheel, I told you how the point was to give the player some intiative potential, that is, to allow them to start things, instead of always waiting to be prompted by NPCs. Well then, I thought, there are two people in a conversation (that is, at least two), and if one is always responding to what the other produces, this makes for a poor experience. So, the conversation is just getting started, you get to choose a conversation topic. The girl reacts to what you had to say about it. And then, the girl chooses another topic of her own to continue the conversation. You react to what she said, then it's your turn to choose a topic again.

But it would be pointless if the girl chose her topics at random. So what happens is that each girl is able to assess the relevance of each conversation topic depending on a number of parameters. And the main parameter is, what did we just talk about? Whatever happens, the girls will always do their best to choose a topic that makes for a smooth transition with the previous one. Think of the conversation as some sort of map, and each topic is plotted on that map like a city. The closer two topics are on the map, the more related they are. What you get is a nice maze to be navigated. When you move to a different topic, you get the conversation closer to a number of other topics—and away from yet another number of them.

This is an example of how a few conversation topics could be organized to illustrate the concept. Say you're chatting with the Artsy Girl and you choose to talk about Video Games. If she wants to talk about the Museum, for instance, she'll politely bring up Movies first, to try and get closer to it, without breaking the flow of the conversation. From there, you can follow her lead and go to Painting or Photography, but you could ignore her and start talking about sports. The thing is that, if you keep pushing the conversation away from the topics a girl wishes to discuss, that will piss her off—no matter whether you retain a Friendly tone at all times!

But it's not as simple as spamming topics that are close to a girl's interests either. Say the Artsy Girl had a fight with the Sporty Girl, and thus wishes to talk about her to ease her mind. So you'll try the Museum, she'll respond with Painting. You'll try Dancing, she'll respond with Martial Arts. If you are oblivious to the cue and try to bring the conversation back to the girl and her interests, the conversation will never turn out the way she intended. In other words, there is not all-purpose strategy to it—you'll have to watch for the girl's choices of topics, and cross-check them with recent events to understand where she's trying to go with that. Also, a girl might try to avoid a particular topic, rather than reach it, in which case she'll do her best to steer the conversation away from it, while still picking good transitions. Or you might be in a situation where you have a conversation with two girls at the same time—say, one who wishes to talk about a particular topic, and one who wishes to avoid that same topic at all costs, to make it fun. As you can see, many different situations can arise, and the idea has a lot of potential.

The difficult part, of course, is that you're not getting a map such as that one in-game. It's all up to you to evaluate how related two topics may be, and what other topics may lie in the direction the girl is trying to take you. So, as you can see, it turns into a nice little mind game between the player and the computer, where you can count on nothing but your wits and keen sense of observation. :) Oh, and did I forget to mention that, just like each girl has her own idea for moods, she also has a personal appreciation of the distances between topics, making a single topic very easy to bring up with one girl, and very difficult with another? Well, there you have it. :)

Anyway, that's about it about conversation topics. Hope I managed to pique your interest, and until next time. :)