Brainstorming: Ideas on how to convey information to the player.

[Seijin8]

Working on a Skyrim/Sexlab mod, but this topic applies broadly to gaming.

 

I am trying to find ways to convey information to the player without subtitled/typed/UI-driven messages.  I'm looking purely for "passive feedback" mechanisms, and not something that requires the player to actively seek out the data.

 

Methods currently in-use:

• Vocal changes in sex participants that hint at enjoyment level and arousal.  Good for consensual scenes, otherwise doesn't convey much and the myriad of voice sets and quirks needed to get a full range of data is really daunting.
• Changes in music pace/tempo.  Hard to do with fantasy-themed/lore-friendly music, but fairly easy with techno/dance; not useful without a dedicated soundtrack that links into the scene and overrides other music or plays where no music previously existed.  Not ideal and the effort-to-output ratio for this method sucks.
• "Flashing" Imagespace modifiers (screen briefly flashes a color to indicate something is happening/changing -- doesn't really convey much as the colors are merely interpretive.)
• "Lingering" Imagespace modifiers (more subtle color gradients -- probably not useful given that many visual/ENB effects can negate these or make them undesirable by the player).
• Controller rumble (I don't use it, but I have enabled it as an option in the mod and I'm listing it for completeness' sake -- no other tactile methods I can think of exist.)
• Character facial expressions (very limited function given that the mod often isn't human-on-human sex and facial expression controls are limited anyway.)

 

I am loathe to add more audio cues as there are already many layers of them happening, but it isn't a hard "no" to those.

 

Still, I don't feel like I am able to convey many things without explicitly stating them in text.

 

I'm considering a picture-in-picture sort of vis effect, but these would be kinda shit to set up and wouldn't be broadly useful (for the variety of "sex partners", many of the images wouldn't be colored/shaded/shaped correctly.  Also unclear if I can get the pic-in-pic to track with the moving camera.  I don't think it can be a static UI element in this case.)

 

So, to the community: any other ideas/methods that might work?  Have you seen other methods used in games that worked well for you?

[worik]

? a few ideas

• subtle change in background noises
• heartbeat audio, 1st person breathing
• PC actor talking to her/himself

 

[Seijin8]

Just now, worik said:

? a few ideas

• subtle change in background noises
• heartbeat audio, 1st person breathing
• PC actor talking to her/himself

 

Thanks for the input.

 

Background noise is tricky.  At base level, I'm already working with about seven sound layers.  Adding anything subtle is likely to be lost in the shuffle.

 

Breathing is already present in the vocal sets for relevant creatures I've so far worked on.  Heartbeat was something I had considered, but hadn't used yet.

 

As for "PC talking to themselves", that would either have to be a dialogue/pop-up message of some type (like what is used in Apropos, which I don't want to replicate the function of), or actual verbal use and that is tricky.  I can get a few useful words here and there, but nothing that conveys deep meaning.  There just isn't enough dialogue to go around for that -- definitely not Sexlab-based.

 

Frankly, for pure descriptions, Apropos is tough to beat.  Still, I would like to not have to read the info if I can hear it instead.

 

To give a for-instance (which is not in the mod yet, but may be in the future): Say on stage 4 of the animation, the audio tells you she is not having a great time of it.  You can hit a hotkey to basically request the partner slow it down or shift to something less rough.  Depending on interaction, maybe it works, maybe not (or maybe it gets worse).  In the case of a vocal request, the use of the hotkey would prompt her to say something that could then be acknowledged through animation changes.

 

Just using the sets I have already, I would need at least five different tones/volumes/styles of each such request/demand that sounded like they fit with the existing (or in development) sound sets.  It is doable, but I'm not sure just how much material I can get that sounds right, and both searching for it and then trying to use EQ matching to fit the surrounding sound patterns is going to be very time-consuming.

 

Most of the sounds/dialogue I use come straight from Pornhub or a similar site, and I've narrowed in on particular porn stars to get the dialogue from.  With that, I have to find enough of it to work with that 1) Doesn't have too much background noise, 2) Has a decent audio environment (reverb in small rooms is terrible), 3) doesn't have another person making too much noise at the same time, 4) Covers a wide enough range of sex acts/tones/styles to go from soft and gentle to getting pounded, and potentially worse.

 

Just isn't much of that available in the quality and quantity I need.  Then needing to find actual words in there.... eh.   I'm already doing it where possible, but I don't think that alone is the best solution.

 

Still, not to say I won't can't use that part.  Just going to be slightly hard to come by.

 

Thanks again for the comments.