dialogue | Line Hollis

The cover of the guide to the Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game.

Trapped in Amber

November 19, 2011 / 6 comments

Last time I checked in with you guys about Mouthwash, I mentioned that I was no longer sure I wanted to use D&D-style dice rolls to determine skill effects, but didn’t know what to replace it with. On Twitter, Stephen Winson suggested I look into a diceless tabletop roleplaying system based on Roger Zelazny’s fantasy series…

Read more →

A screenshot from Mouthwash testing, showing a short and nonsensical dialogue between two characters name Roni and Maryam.

The Next Step

November 6, 2011 / 11 comments

Fuckin’ Shakespeare, I know. But this insipid nonsense represents an important step forward for Mouthwash, because Maryam (an NPC) is now capable of having goals: in this case, making Roni (the player character) happy and expressing her own emotions. She’s also capable of taking simple steps to meet those goals, provided she has access to…

Read more →

Readings: Lost in Transition

October 13, 2011 / 5 comments

I’ve been neglecting the old blog for a while, due to a combination of work piling up and not being able to get back into my old routine. But I’m back, hello! Here’s some of what I’ve been reading while I was gone. A Fate That We Deserve: Choice, Triumph, and All That Remains. This is…

Read more →

Chemical Reactions

September 6, 2011 / 0 comments

This is up a bit late. I blame Labor Day! Also, getting swamped at work. Anyway, last week I was mainly playing through last May’s Experimental Gameplay Project entries, with the theme of “ZOOM.” The Camera Made Me Fat! and Broken Zoomometer [direct download link] Both of these games use a pretty straightforward interpretation of the…

Read more →

Weekly Update: This Ends Nothing!

September 5, 2011 / 0 comments

This week at Robot Geek, I discuss the recent fake findings about how rarely players finish games in the context of narrative theory in Ending vs. Resolution. (Sorry about the video ads. We’re working on it.) Some of this is inspired by some weird behavior I’ve noticed in my own play style. With a lot…

Read more →

Mouthwash: Viewpoints

August 31, 2011 / 6 comments

In previous discussions of Mouthwash, I’ve mentioned that there are four domains in which actions can take place: goals, emotions, viewpoints, and relationships. I’ve talked a bit about goals and emotions, which brings me to viewpoints. This was the domain that scared me the most when I started sketching out Mouthwash, because it’s the domain…

Read more →

Dragon Age 2: The Champion of Kirkwall

August 20, 2011 / 0 comments

It took me a long time, but I finally finished my first playthrough of Dragon Age 2. This is the first of a couple posts I’ll be writing on it. To get the overall opinion stuff out of the way first, I was pretty crazy about the game. I wasn’t too offended by the reused…

Read more →

Conversation Games in the Wild: Deadwood

June 24, 2011 / 7 comments

One of the things I’ve been doing in the course of developing the Mouthwash conversation gameplay is to analyze transcripts of TV shows with good dialogue. The idea is to have some good examples to work with while I figure out conversational skills and how all the dynamics work together. So the first thing I…

Read more →

AI and Character

June 17, 2011 / 3 comments

I’m starting to set up some of the basic AI programming in Mouthwash, my work-in-progress conversation system. (Some background here.) I wasn’t planning to get to that stuff so soon, but it became apparent pretty quickly that a lot of other stuff depends on the speakers having “goals.” So I’m having to deal with planning…

Read more →

A Brief Introduction to Mouthwash

June 2, 2011 / 3 comments

Previously, I’ve talked about conversation systems and my discontent with them. Talk is cheap; so in addition to complaining about it, I’ve been working on an engine called Mouthwash to make these ideas more concrete. Eventually I do plan to develop some games with it, but for now it’s a lot of notes and a…

Read more →