Thanqol Learns To Draw Six: Stealing Time

[TheAmishPirate]

Correct-o-mundo.

Excellent. This tells me everything I need to know about how to build this thing.

There are 8 Johnson personalities. The first crisis will reduce that to a potential 4. The second crisis to 2. The third crisis to 1. Each dialogue scene will be written from the perspective of trying to force a wedge between those potential Johnsons - i.e. if he's an AI he'll respond like this and if he's a drunk he'll respond like this. I'll do a few different clusters of these divides - one cluster might be Johnson 1-4 vs 5-8 in round one, the second one might be 1,2,5,6 vs 3,4,7,8 in round one, etc. Keeping it 'paired' somewhat means that I can save a bit on writing - round 1 might have the widest range of Johnsons but if round 3 is always 1v2, 3v4 etc then it'll cut down on the exponential writing curve thing.

Strategically I'm going to try and make sure it's worth going through a round or two of info even if you later take a round of position because it'll still rule out at least a few potential endgames - and in a strategy game knowing which corners you can cut is the key to victory.

Does that sound vaguely sensible?

It does. I was wondering how you were going to split them up, and I think this is a sensible way to do it. It'll still require a heck of a lot of writing, but it's not nearly as much as it could be.

Though this does make me realize another potential feature of the design; for any given dialogue tree, will there be two versions of the tree? One in which Johnson responds as one set of profiles, and another where he responds in the opposite set? Or do the trees only diverge at the very end where you get the information?