Working with AI for dialogue

As much as I would like for the entire interaction to be driven by AI as I have discussed in earlier Devlog it doesn't make sense $$$ wise at the moment. Instead, we are writing out all the dialogue and the dialogue tree branches to allow for more interesting interactions with Roxanne. That doesn't mean I can't use AI to make better dialogue though!

One of the major issues with writing dialogue, especially for myself is that it all starts to sound a lot like something I would say, coming from both the NPC and the player. My ideal outcome with things I would definitely say from my own lexicon. To minimize this I've used a NSFW AI Chatbot that can #1 hold conversations that are NSFW without freaking out like ChatGPT. And two, I can input Roxanne's backstory, traits and quirks so that the AI draws from this knowledge base when I am interacting with her.

This allows me to get a larger variety of text responses that sound more like something Roxanne would say rather than what I want her to say. That being said, I can still regenerate the responses till I get something I want, or edit the responses on the fly and continue the conversation with the newly edited dialogue. This was actually really quite fun and an interesting way to generate dialogue which I think will become more and more popular as people discover these tools.

After several back and forth conversations with the AI, I came up with 3 major dialogue trees. Good, Neutral, & Bad. Though I will need to go through and refine them quite a bit, especially the BAD conversation tree, I now have a base framework to build the dialogue trees on. This will be much easier to setup the various actions I need to build into the conversation as well as the various unlocks. You can see from the image below the dialogue tree on the left is mostly fleshed out. 

It also has several colored squares which represent unlocks/fail states/and scene unlocks you will achieve as you go through the conversation with Roxanne. Beyond these dialogue unlocks I think I will have some contextual or physics based unlocks like if you manage to pour wine in the glass you might get a toy unlock or something like that.

Finally, I've built the menu into the world itself, I'm not a fan of screen space UI canvases or any HUD at all to be honest. This also makes a good and logical hiding spot for the Menu in VR as well. Picking up the Menu will allow the player in VR to just flip it over in their hand and manipulate the canvas. In Flatscreen you can still pickup and throw the menu like normal, but pressing the interact button which is currently set to E will bring the menu into the player's view and make it interactable. I still need to add a few little context cues such as E to interact on the menu and other items in the world. This is important for the Flatscreen version as it will be difficult to simulate drinking from a glass without hitting the Interact button. In VR I can have the player pickup the glass and physically bring it to their face and simulate drinking that way.

Next up is to add the unlock code in the dialogue trees so that when the player reaches that part of the dialogue it unlocks the corresponding item in the menu. So far that seems like it will be Toys, Clothing/Alternate Colors, and of course sex scenes. I would like to have a lot of sex scenes but perhaps it can unlock different positions in the scene which would be more manageable.