NPC mapping

Let's talk about NPC mapping system. Technically it was implemented in 0.18, but there was no actual dialogs/events that used it, so there was no point writing about it back then. But now is a good time to tell you about it since we had some time to start going over old texts and—more importantly—started using it in 0.19.

Now some of you might have looked into the settings menu and noticed the thing is, em, kind of massive. The good news is it's 100% optional, if you don't want to deal with it, feel free to skip the rest of the post, there will be no Game Over if you fail to learn how the NPC mapping works. It has default parameters and the game works just fine if you don't change anything.

With that out of the way, here are the basics: we quickly realized we need two different forms: formal and personal. For example, when Alice asks Kate if she lives alone, Kate replies something along the line of "I live with my {childhood friend} Julia" (childhood friend is the part you can replace with whatever you want). Since Julia isn't even in the room in that example, using something personal like {bestie} in that sentence would look weird and out of place. However, a phrase like "I want you to stick your [redacted] in my [redacted], {tenant}" looks goofy as hell too. Because of that, all character nicknames/history have two different forms depending on the situation. Formal one is mostly used in public/when someone is talking about the character and personal is mostly used during conversations with the character, especially during adult content.

We didn't want to impose any nicknames like sweeties or darlings, so by default a lot of them are just characters' names. That, however, doesn't mean you can just rename all the characters. Earlier example says "{childhood friend} Julia", not "{childhood friend} {Julia}". So if you go and change every Ann to, I don't know, Penelope, then she's still going to be called Ann most of the time and the whole thing will be super confusing. On that note, feel free to put something silly in there in hopes to get something along the lines of "{I farted}, were you even listening to me?", we promise we won't be mad :)

As you might have guessed from the {childhood friend}, you can use more than one word and replacing Max with something like Big Max should probably be fine.

And the last thing, as you can see from the settings menu, we grouped up some of them in an attempt to make the whole thing a little bit more manageable. Having unique mappings between every character in the villa and then multiplying the number by two would create ridiculous number of parameters, so we shaved it down to the best of our abilities. Translator's note: in the beginning Dark didn't even want to have more than eight(!) parameters and now we have 34. If I suggest doubling or even tripling that number he might throw me out of the window like in that vintage meme :)