Summary

This week we delivered our vertical slice character, Adam. This character

• Can generate answer for a wide variety of questions based on its context
  • Description
  • Example answers
• Has a unique “stress meter” which changes based on player’s input tone
• Changes his tone based on his stress value
• Has a unique visual for each emotional state

Art

For the visual we came up with an unique portrait for Adam for each emotional state. He goes from calm to irritated, angry, shocked and sad. These choices are based on the characterization in our Narrative Design Document.

Game Design

Speaking of emotional state, we redesigned our stress value meter and how they reacts to certain tones from the player. The paragraph below from our design document demonstrates the new algorithm.

Stress is currently on a scale from 1 to 100. With transitions between stress levels happening at 25, 50, 75, and 100.

The effectiveness of a tone, which is a multiplier on its base value, starts out at 1. But it decreases for each question asked according to 1 – (X/Y)^2. Where X is the number of questions asked and Y is the amount of questions needed to get to minimum effectiveness. The effectiveness multiplier has a minimum of 0. For each question you ask with a different tone X decreases by 1, with a minimum of 0.

Programming

In addition to implementing the emotional state algorithm we also made a few visual updates. Below is a search bar to support players searching keywords in the transcript.