A Charming Conversation With Charles on the Topic of Charity!

This will be a short entry to read, but might provide you with a lot of replay value!

We already talked about our dialogue system, more than once, and for this weeks lore blog, we decided to give you a glimpse of how the conversation works with actual in-game dialogue. It’s from almost the very beginning of the game, so don’t worry about spoilers.

As you might know, we’re using ink, the open source format for writing non-linear stories. So far we’ve written tens of thousands of words of dialogue, not to mention many times that amount in lore discussions and so on… Just the blog-posts alone count over a hundred thousand words already. We’re prolific that way, but is there quality behind the quantity? We’ll let you decide for yourself today!

We’ve compiled a short conversation excerpt from the Burrows (the mining city where Charles also has his lab), and it’s really all a tangential discussion on the role of charity in society. It gets triggered when you ask the miners (Inigo, Crabbe, and Rowan) to answer some questions about the outbreak of a strange new disease, but they would much rather you didn’t investigate out of the goodness of your heart.

The dialogue should give you insight in the problems ailing the Kingdom and the solutions that are slowly arising. The main characters:

Rowan – a young miner, a revolutionary at heart, spreading dissent and enticing his fellow miners to strike. He’s using the outbreak to try and stir up a strike and change the working conditions in the Burrows for the better.

Inigo – an older miner who’s gotten over the disease and whose insight you really need to help the doc solve the outbreak. He’s bitter over what happened to his friend Paul (a miner who also got the disease but didn’t quite make it), and is helping Rowan strike against the management of the mining company to get them to do something about the outbreak.

Crabbe – a tough cookie, a bit slow but well-meaning at heart, and although he doesn’t get most of the stuff Rowan says, he believes Rowans union is in his best interest, and that of the other workers too (incidentally, some of us think so too)

And finally – Charles – our protagonist – a hedgehog scholar summoned by the King for an unknown but urgent reason, now sadly stuck in the Burrows due to the mine-shaft elevator being broken down and the main engineer being in a coma induced by an outbreak of an unknown disease.

Find out why the rabbit miners don’t want you to help out for free, and see how you can convince them to share their insights anyway in this short exchange. Feel free to replay as many times as you like for various conversations, by using Quill, the online ink compiler:

Once you’re done, we’d be happy to catch your thoughts and get feedback on any of our standard channels – Discord, Facebook, Twitter or even right below this very article.