Working with Drama Princess in The Path is actually quite fun. It’s easy to add new actors, objects or behaviours and see them function in the game immediately. But we are also discovering some things that should probably be adjusted in the Drama Princess design. One of those things is the idea that in general, all behaviours with all objects are available to all actors. This is a fine idea in theory, but in practice, for an actor to be able to interact with an object, a specific animation needs to be made. And often, if you’re telling a story, for most of the actors, doing this behaviour is irrelevant. We prevent actors from trying to do behaviours that we have no animations for by tweaking the Conditions for selecting the behaviour. In the game, we often end up with the conditions being “if the actor is actor A or B”, which is not really the point of the conditions.
I still think that the theory is great: that in principle every actor can act out every behaviour. But since they would all do this in their own way, this becomes virtually impossible in practice because of the massive amount of animations this requires. Maybe in the future, it will be possible to build an animation system that doesn’t require all these assets but works in a more generative way, while still allowing enough room for expressing personality and attitude (created by an artist).