Wow, it’s been a little while! Glad to be back!
I was out of the office for the last few weeks so it’s been hard to sit down and write stuff for the blog, but we haven’t stopped working! After the Hopeless Start release (which if you haven’t played, totally check it out) we went back to focusing more on ReAct.
Before HS, I had written about a third of ReAct. Then we built our engine for HS to work out the kinks on a smaller scale. So what we are doing now is getting the first third of ReAct into the engine and working out the kinks with the different mechanics. I’m eager to continue writing ReAct but it would be a waste of time without making sure what we have works.
So while we work on getting that figured out, I have two extra projects going on. The first one is another messenger bot. The bot is a side character from ReAct, Abby, a teenager at the local high school. She is going to send a message asking for help because she believes a man from the library is following her home. The player is going to need to guide her home safe while also keeping her trust (by not giving her bad advice) or something bad might happen! I’m really excited to work on this and deal with this subject. Especially in the context of messenger. My hope is to make it fairly seamless (not sure if I will do buttons or typing though, thoughts?) to create the experience that this is one of your friends on messenger. This is something that happens and is scary. How can you help, what do you do when it’s integrated into your real life? This is the kind of stuff I love to work on!
The other thing I’m working on is taking a well known dialogue tree and implementing a scene of it into my engine to show the capabilities of our engine for ReAct. It’s more passive right now, but still pretty awesome to do.
I’m hoping to have both those projects and to start working on the ReAct writing again next month! Oh, and if you have any comments on Hopeless Start or our messenger bot, I’d love to hear them! Shoot me or the official Bullet Decision page an ask!
See ya next week.
Alex Acton 