MMO Prototype - Phase 2.5 - Need writers

Phase 2.5 of my MMO Prototype will be available soon! I label it "2.5" as it's essentially an extension of phase two which was designed as a stress test for the server.


New additions are as followed:

  • To help people stress test, I've added in a /dance command that will automatically shift the player character back and forth indefinitely (until cancelled by manual movement). This will enable people to run multiple instances of the client so that more is asked of the server.

  • To accomplish what SotA was originally trying to do with its dialogue system, I've written my own text parser. Players can now walk up to an NPC and chat with them.


What delays this new phase from being available right now is that, while NPCs can understand typed words, they offer no replies of their own... because there's no text written. This is where some of you come in:


I need people to write generic dialogue.


"Generic" in the sense that if a particular NPC doesn't have a custom response to the player's text, the NPC would fall back to these generic responses.

A character like Thrall (from World of Warcraft), for example, might have custom dialogue if you were to talk to him about his hammer but, if you suddenly ask him about the weather, he should still be able to output something other than "I don't understand what you mean."


So what I ask of you is this:

Write dialogue for no particular character. The regular NPCs that players would encounter in a medieval fantasy world. Name an archetype (like a villager, or a noble, or blacksmith, etc), type in what a player might ask them and then write what that response would be.

In a google.doc word file or excel sheet for ease of access.


example:

Blacksmith
input - "hello"

output - "Hello there!  Do you need anything repaired?  Or maybe you're after some new equipment?"


Small talk. No quest/stories or anything (at least not yet). This also applies to enemies (like bandits or cultists) as I'm hoping to allow players to talk their way out of conflicts.


Hopefully I can get some people interested in writing these while I focus my attention on other game systems. For those who are interested, don't worry about the specifics as to what the player types; that's just so that I have an idea of what that NPC response was meant to accomplish.


If you guys want to go fancy and use brackets for specific things like [player name] or [npc name], go ahead. You can also write multiple variants (to avoid NPCs to repeat the same thing over an over) and I'll have the NPCs randomly output a response if there's more than one available.


With enough people, I'm hoping to collect a relatively large library of responses for all sorts of NPCs.


The goal for phase 2.5 is for people to have fun engaging in small talk with NPCs. Let's make it happen!

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