Dear Reader:
Heaven's Vault dev details the process of making investigative conversations
According to the developer of Heaven's Vault, the game has three major pillars; exploration, translation and conversation. Of the three, conversation proposed the most unique challenges. In a blog on the game, dev Jon Ingold discusses how the team approached conversation in order to make it deeper than what most games provide.
With conversation as a game pillar, we wanted to make dialogue vital, and make characters who are rich, and meaningful, and are full of hidden depths. I outlined the approach we took to Heaven’s Vault’s dialogue in a talk at Adventure X in 2018 entitled “Sparkling Dialogue”, which goes through the process of determining the subtext of each major scene, and then building choices and responses in order to reinforce and develop that subtext. The goal is to create scenes which are dramatically interesting while still giving the player freedom.
However, that strategy only covers half the problem. In interactive scenes, the player is not simply a participant in conversation, they have goals as well - often, they have several. In a game like Heaven’s Vault, the player usually has dozens of “open questions” which they are researching, and will want to be able to ask relevant characters about.