Future Plans #27

Hi everyone!

For the first reward post for this month, I'd like to share a feature of my next game (xianxia game called Fate of the Celestial Mirror) with you all that I'm really proud and fond of!

You may have seen in a previous post that the game revolves around a point and click map and quests-based branching narrative structure. I mentioned last time that there's a special kind of "quest" that's called flavor conversations — and today, I'll show you an example of how they work!

Flavor Conversations

Basically, these are opportunities to have bonus short conversations or scenes with the love interests. The way you trigger them is slightly different from the quest scenes — when you enter the location that the love interest is at, the scene doesn't automatically trigger. Instead, you'll be greeted with a scene like this:

You see how the background of the location has a small version of the love interest added, as well as a small speech bubble icon above his head? You can now click on him to speak to him!

Here's an example video of what it's like:

https://youtu.be/asInpkqAhds

Did you notice how at the end of the video, if I exit the area and come back in again, mini Pei Yi is now in a different spot doing something else?

Yup, that's right! Every love interest has a few variations of what "idle activity" they're up to in their free time, and it randomizes every time you run into them! My hopes is that it'll feel immersive and make the characters feel alive — like they have their own life and hobbies that they spend time on outside of just interacting with you during the story/quest scenes.

This is probably one of my favorite features of the whole game. It was kind of a headache to code in, even with help from Shawna, my awesome friend and the programmer behind Our Life, but I'm really happy with how it turned out! I can only hope that the players will appreciate this too... haha.

What do you think about this feature? Let me know in comments below!