ja2ke posted:

On the surface, dialogue interactions in Firewatch will probably feel pretty similar to Telltale and other modern timer-based conversations. There are a few differences, though. The most obvious one comes from the fact that Firewatch is primarily a back and forth between two people -- that alone let us really drill down on the things you can talk about, and the variances that can happen within a single conversation. The game's script is very focused on Henry and Delilah and the way their relationship can build as the story unfolds. There are multiple telltale-episode-scripts worth of dialogue dedicated to just those conversations and all their various forms.

Under the hood, Firewatch also does not use explicit pre-written dialog trees - we opted to use a tag-driven dynamic dialogue system like the one Valve uses. You can watch a fascinating GDC talk about their in here, but in short, every line of dialogue in Firewatch is self contained, and uses a simple but smart tag-based system to find the optimal line to play next. So instead of writing five conversation branches where Henry asks Delilah "How are you doing?" and she has five unique followups, Henry asking "How are you doing?" can trigger an event called "DelilahReplyToHowAreYouDoing" which can then find the most appropriate reply in the script, based on which facts are currently true or false in the game's variable set. It has allowed us to write a lot more variation and responsiveness to player action into the script at a very fine grained level. Firewatch isn't using "procedural dialogue" or anything like that -- every line is still scripted to appear in a specific place in the story depending on a person's playthrough -- but we can author branching down to the level of a single line mid-conversation, and it's very fast and cheap for us to do that, so it happens a lot.

Also conversations are regularly interruptable. Your primary tool in the game is the walkie talkie, used to report or discuss the things you find in the world, so if you find something more interesting than the current conversation, you can (and should) start talking about it instead, and you won't have to wait for the current dialogue tree to finish. Anything you already discussed in the previous conversation is remembered by the game so you don't "lose" the contents of a conversation by interrupting it. In practice it tends to mean that when you're in a really dense environment full of interesting things to talk about, it feels like Henry and Delilah bounce around between subjects at a high clip as their familiarity with the space improves, while when you're out in the deep wilderness, the conversation threads tend to run longer and deeper because there's time and space to talk. But the pace of conversation is generally up to you.

Our goal is that Firewatch's conversations play out naturally as a flowing and growing relationship over the course of the game, and don't feel like a string of mini-cutscenes or mini-audiologs. Hopefully it works out!


There's no proceduraly-generated content. It's a handmade world. The time of day system is all operating in realtime, but is driven by the story (if you stand still for hours it won't become night time, but as you progress through the story, the world does change around you in realtime). You can also pick up and throw things around to make big gross piles of garbage (or keep them in your tower) like you can in Gone Home and other physics-aware exploration games. I honestly can't remember if there are guns in the game. There's definitely a radio, a flashlight, and a compass.