Writing scripts for interactive conversations must be hard. Can you tell us a little bit about how you approach it? Also, some RPGs tend to fall into dialogue trees whose branches all just loop back to the same options, and only amount to skipping or re-ordering parts of the conversation -- you can keep asking questions about different topics until you've "caught them all". Is that something you're looking to avoid in favour of a more natural feel/flow in Star Citizen conversations?asked by KitBash

So, Chris' marching orders from the get-go has always been: Immersion. And being able to go back and re-ask questions all over and just have these kind of looping cycles of narrative definitely break that. So, from the get-go it's always been: if you miss a conversation, you miss it. You can't really re-trigger them and if there is a branch and you choose one of the branches, you don't get to see the other one. That's your choice and you kind of have to live with that. And putting those stakes that high - knowing that these conversations are kind of delicate flowers for you to experience, I think, gives them more value and weight and hopefully will make them more engaging in that if you want to find our more about characters that you really have to actively engage with the NPCs rather than just clicking on them and going through these big cycling loops.So, we're still definitely fleshing out the whole conversation system and we've been doing some awesome stuff with the Squadron 42 shoot that's going on right now that I'm really excited about. So, yeah it's pretty cool. I think.

The first question, the process behind it... I haven't done as many interactive conversations yet as he [points at Will] has obviously, doing a lot of the squadron 42 work... but I do think the process of actually writing branching conversations is really interesting, at least from a writing perspective... and it can be difficult but if you know the character, if you know who's saying it, then it's just about modulating their responses based on the way it goes. So, it's actually something that I find a lot of fun to do and it's kind of interesting to do... to be able to really understand a character by getting not only one view of their relationship to a subject or an answer but a stream of them. So, it's something that, when I get a chance to do it, I definitely like doing it.

Yeah, it's... the process, or at least how I approach it, is when you come to that question of when it feels like the player has two possible things... like, it makes sense for you to be able to go in two different directions. Like, it's not a clear answer... and that's when we say, "Alright, this is the perfect place for a branch." We try to come up with two big differences. If both answers feel very similar, then why are we doing the branch? We might as well just have the answer be what it is. So, kind of the first step is thinking, "Alright, what are the two things you can say in this situation," and then thinking about the NPCs reaction to those and where it goes off from there and then further branching... and then it can get a mess really fast.Right now we're using traditional screenwriting software to do the branching dialogue stuff which has its own sort of problems. It's not really built for a non-linear conversation, so we have to use all of these headers and stuff to know that this is option 1, and then it goes here... and little arrows to point where it's branching back to and all of this stuff... but we have a crack team of programmers and stuff who are working on exploring options to help us write these more in kind of a tree node flow mode which is coming online... so hopefully that will help us do more and more complicated stuff, it'll be great.