Conviction Chronicles blog post #22 - Hallway events

 Basically this is the first part of adding to the cafe, and this is mostly with the "hallway to the cafe" area where the player can sometimes see another character there and interact with them.

Doing any option prevents the player from being in the cafe, and ultimately becomes a massive risk vs reward.

Anybody from the cast, Bianca/Cuddles, and the assistant can be talked to in a hallway event.

Risk

The main risk is that you cannot view the rest of the cafe events and see what happens. It also means if the kitchen is spiked, anybody not in the cafe will be viewed with more suspicion automatically.

Evidence Sharing

Evidence sharing can happen here and it's one of the only places where it can happen before an investigation can start. Adds more opportunities for it to happen. This is actually the most important of the options due to how strong evidence sharing can be at the right moment, along with blackmail.

Purchasing

The player has an option to pay for the chance of an item from another character, which can allow you to see what they have in their inventory using circumstantial evidence. For example, if they have screws, they most likely also have a screwdriver somewhere. If they have medical labels, then it's clear some of the medication has been messed with. etc. 

Talking

Talking has the ability to reveal who the mole is subtly through facial expression changes. There are certain conditions that have to be met with each dialogue. Most involve if the person you are talking to is injured or if they have a different personality than their default. Lily is the most unique as she has the most options and her changes reveals others as moles instead of herself. The conversations for everybody varies for what their priorities are. Some are more subtle than others.

Everybody has requirements to like/dislike if you want to have more of a conversation before being cut off. 

Anything else?

This is made to be played before the cafe and the "pre-cafe events" which is more of group events with more ways to define the cast more with the cast interactions outside trials.

A big thing with the "pre-cafe events" is it's going to need a lot of dialogue. When I mean a lot of dialogue, I really do mean it. It's going to take 1-3 months (calm estimate) to do it all kind of big. (It's going to have to have individual events, two characters speaking events, group events, reaction events, etc) Mainly since I remembered when I played Pyre a couple of times, the game is amazing with everything it has when the player is failing when there is more characters in the active party. But the better the player is doing, the less interesting it all becomes due to the amount of dialogue and events shrinks drastically. Since things are more inevitable in this game for things to shrink for the cast size, I have to figure out ways to add more dialogue when the cast becomes smaller to always keep it interesting/fresh when there are less opertunities. Which will take a very long time, and when I do start it, I'm not going to be able to do anything else outside these events until it's done. Mainly since it's suppose to last across multiple playthroughs, where it should remain interesting after a couple of playthroughs with things to discover. This is probably the second most important thing to get right outside the trials.

A bigger thing to do first is improving the game settings screen, and adding some sort of "calendar" thing that shows all of the actions you have done in the past to review with ways to store that information. Showing something near the end about what kind of player the player was in that playthrough. And at the end of the game, or when the player dies, shows off a screen where they can see what the other characters did in each day. Part of this is quality of life, but is also going to be great for further playtesting.

Eventually I will have to deal with replacing/fixing some of the animations as well. But yeah it's a lot pilled up to get through before the trials can even begin, and by that point it's going to be much smoother of an experience to make. But it's all things that have to get done, so it won't be too bad.

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