The Salmon of Doubt

D.A. Yeah, exactly. Once the place begins to develop, you then put characters in it. But it isn’t about the characters, it’s about the ship. What I then wanted to do was something ... Well it was either very old-fashioned or very radical, depending which way you look at it; I wanted to build a conversation engine into the game. Years and years ago, I did a game based on Hitchhiker’s Guide with a company called Infocom, which was a great company. They were doing witty, intelligent, literate games based on text. You know, there are several thousand years of human culture telling you you can do quite a lot with text, and putting in the extra element of interactivity should just add to the possibilities. You turn the computer into the storyteller and the player into the audience, like in the old days when the storyteller would actually respond to the audience, rather than just having the audience respond to the storyteller. I had an enormous amount of fun, actually, working on that. I just loved constructing these virtual conversations between the player and the machine. So I just thought it’d be lovely to try to extend that and do more with it in a modern graphics game. Because what I would like to do is see if one can take that old conversation technology and make characters really speak. Put them in an environment and see where you go from there. So we started to tackle this problem of being able to speak to the characters.

Of course, everything you do with language just balloons as a problem. To begin with, we wanted to do it whereby it would be text-to-speech, which gives you the advantage that you have much more flexibility in constructing sentences on the fly. On the other hand, all of your characters sound like semi-concussed Norwegians, which I felt was a downside. So we eventually realized we were going to have to do prerecorded speech. And I thought, “That’s terrible, because you only have a limited number of responses. It’s just going to be ... Oh, I’m not sure about that.” So the way we eventually solved the problem, or gradually solved the problem, was that the amount of prerecorded speech just got bigger, and bigger, and bigger, and bigger. We just did another two-hour recording session this morning. We’ve now got something like sixteen hours of little conversational snippets: little phrases, sentence half-sentences, and all the things the machine puts together on the fly in response to what you type in. For a long time it wasn’t working very well. And now, just really in the last two or three weeks, it’s started to come together, and it’s started to be spooky. People come in and say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I don’t see how this is going to work. How ’’bout if you ask it this?” and they do, and their jaw drops. It’s just wonderful. People come in and spend hours just sitting, locked in conversation with these characters. I hasten to add that with the sixteen hours of dialogue, it was a small team of us who wrote it. I did part of the dialogue writing, and other people did some, and we all pulled it together. It’s pretty remarkable when it works, you suddenly have this populated world. Very strange, damaged robots crawling around the place, all of whom have a wide range of opinions and attitudes and ideas and strange histories, and know about some entirely unexpected things. You can engage them all in conversation.

hasten to add that with the sixteen hours of dialogue, it was a small team of us who wrote it. I did part of the dialogue writing, and other people did some, and we all pulled it together. It’s pretty remarkable when it works, you suddenly have this populated world. Very strange, damaged robots crawling around the place, all of whom have a wide range of opinions and attitudes and ideas and strange histories, and know about some entirely unexpected things. You can engage them all in conversation.