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Conviction Chronicles blog post #49 - Body Discovery Graphics

 This is mostly a replacement to the old system of collecting evidence from a body. Before it would only show the cause of death and then gives the evidence. Now it shows some graphics, playing music to respond to it, along with showing the body discovery when interacting with a corpse for the first time. Basics Lots of variations on the body discovery corpses to showcase more details on why they died which helps with the cause of death text. For example if someone died in combat, their corpse will either be bruised up or have blood all over it. The text takes in consideration who the player is and what relationship they had with the character. Mainly if they were a rival, the player interacted with them at all in their free time, etc. There are three body discovery themes. One is the default. The second plays when discovering the body of someone the player has romanced. The third is exclusive to Alexis. The default is one of the songs I made at the beginning of development. The se...
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Conviction Chronicles blog post #48 - Character planning system + Backend romance system

 This was a good amount of code, but it ended up working better than I thought. What is this? Basically this is a forced planning system for the backend's character AI that forces them to use their past, relationships, perspectives, and more to determine what they should do. Perspective system Every time an AI meets with another or the player, they get a gathering of their susceptibility and charisma with some other factors to determine strength perspective. This changes every time an interactions happens as it's refreshed. Group Intelligence The intelligence system needs more work, but basically it determines the mental intelligence of someone from 1-200. The more intelligent they are, the more likely they will stick to a plan. And factors like doing certain actions will increase or decrease intelligence. This is mainly so there is more of a negative to getting injured and such for the character AI. Relationship system Every motive there is a chance for a relationship check, w...
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Conviction Chronicles blog post #47 - Character tracking system

 This didn't take as long as I thought, but it's implemented with some bug fixes. I still have to go back to verify everything is working as intended for certain areas of it, mainly with player actions involving doors/airvents, but overall it works. How does it work? Whenever the player does a certain action or a character, it records it in that day's storage. This is so it can be referenced later. Some aspects are annoying to record. If I wanted to record purchases made through a shop that isn't randomized, I would have to rewrite a bunch of code to record item changes and that is not fun. So for the player it just records they went into the shop for this instance. In general it records a vast majority of actions with some info on it. For example if a character not controlled by the player messed with a door, it's recorded which door they messed with, along with what item they used to trap it. It doesn't impact performance, since all it's really doing is ca...
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Conviction Chronicles blog post #46 - The Mirror of Fates

  Alignment I talked about this in the last blog post, but it's a way to flavorfully simply and look at the actions of everybody and reference it with the 9 point axis system of law vs chaos and light vs dark. Everybody has a default and that default changes if default personalities are turned off. Before implementing a full on action tracking system, I knew I wanted something separate from it that's easier to call upon and manipulate.  Mirror Room This unlocks a special room for this and it costs no energy to view the data. Originally it was going to be a simulated trial that shows how everyone could vote. I realized it ended up being too revealing, it would become extremely easy to see who the mole would vote for and compare it to the simulation. It didn't have much thought in finding the weakpoint, and it's not good game design to give such a powerful ability to any character for free. Now the idea is it shows everyone's alignments anonymously with a blue dot on ...
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Conviction Chronicles blog post #45 - Hint Events

I might add more to this in the future, as right now there are hint events with Cuddles and Bianca. The songs for these events I released a bit ago. These events are fully optional, outside one scene. I won't mention that scene since it's full of spoilers, but the only thing I will say is if the player goes a certain route, Bianca will no longer help the player with hint events. If Bianca is alive when the game ends, she is there. If not then Cuddles takes her place.  General Gameplay Hints This gives a general gameplay hint, sometimes it will give some lore instead for Cuddles/Bianca. Protag hints This will give a hint on the chosen protag's playstyle along with extra commentary on the flashbacks. Part of this is to make sure certain details aren't lost, but they mostly try to make the player ask certain questions of the events was too subtle about it. Motive Hints This gives a hint based on what motive was active when the player won/died, along with tips on how to pre...
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Conviction Chronicles blog post #44 - Wakeup events part 1

Wakeup events  These events can happen when someone enters your dorm room, if you are aligned with them or are romancing, they have a stringer chance of happening. Sometimes they won't happen at all unless you are romancing/aligned with them. Bias System This is why it's called part 1, but this system's framework was added where it's going to use cafe events to determine dialogue tied to it so it's more natural/continuing. Eventually once I add more text events when talking to people before 1 on 1 events, it will get this as well.  Once the cafe rework is done, then I'll go back to this. General stuff about the wakeup events When an investigation happens they allow for evidence sharing and if the other person likes your character enough, they will ask your opinion on who is the killer or not. Shanks won't talk to your character in this way unless romanced/aligned with him, but in an investigation he might storm your room and call you the killer. The same wit...
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Conviction Chronicles blog post #43 - The Lawbreaker’s Edict

 I talked about the Taboo Roulette already for that aspect of this motive, so I'll go for the rest of it since it's now done. I talked a bit about the general idea of the Lawbreaker's Edict, but it's a motive where the killer can choose a new law to go into effect and if they survive it gets applied. All of these are suppose to be weaker than normal motives as they become secondary effects. Only one rule can be altered per game, so these don't stack on each other. The Action Squeeze Everybody gets a limited max amount of actions per day that is randomized from 5-10. Going over leads to the character being punished with injuries. Inflation Protocol The funny name aside, this leads Crafting to have a cost behind it that is based on the date. The longer the game is, the harder it is to craft effectively. The Price of Lies  This impacts evidence sharing, if anybody tells a fabricated lie they have to pay a financial fine that is undisclosed to anybody else. Makes lies e...
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