Dynamic choices for dialog, movement, looking, etc (question)

[Ziggy]

I haven't started working on this yet, but I wanted to ask about it first so that I had a better idea of what I would be getting myself into, and if my exact idea is even possible.

In my game idea, the top half of the screen is an image of what your character is seeing, the room he is in or a street view, etc. The bottom half of the screen are text options like 'look', 'move', etc, and that's how you control the game. If you've played the game Snatcher, picture that. How I want this to work is when you click on 'look' you might only have one option like 'area' or 'street'. Clicking that will give you a description that could contain some keywords like 'tavern' or 'shoppe'. After you have discovered these keywords they would be added to the 'look' and 'move' menus. If you 'looked' at 'tavern' you might get another keyword like 'dwarf'. Then another category, 'talk', would show up under 'look' and 'move' and have the keyword 'dwarf' inside of it.

That brings me to the dialog system. On your journey, you will get keywords that show up under the menus like 'look' and 'move', but those would be room-specific. You're not going to be looking at the street once you enter the tavern, etc. You will also get keywords that are for dialog that will span across all rooms. For example, when you start a conversation with any character, your only options are these keywords, kind of like clues, that you picked up. If you have ever played Shadowrun on SNES, picture that. So you will have this changing list of keywords when talking to different characters, it has to span all rooms, and they all have to have their own responses, which may contain more keywords for dialog choices.

So, hoping I explained that clearly enough, how easy or difficult would this system be to create?

Thanks for taking the time to read this, and any responses are appreciated.

[Khris]

All perfectly possible, and I'd say requires medium scripting skills. You'll definitely want to create a proper system for this, meaning you can use something like oDwarf.Unlock(eVerbLook); in your scripts.

Global dialog keywords could be handled by the inventory system; a dummy character starts out with an empty inventory and dialog topics get added to it as the game progresses.
Having different categories takes a bit more work but is also perfectly possible.

[Ziggy]

I'm not afraid of learning some ags scripting. I expected I would need to. For dialog as inventory I actually did kind of think of that, but what if I wanted an actual inventory with items as well(as text options like everything else). Can you have two?

[Khris]

Each character can have her own inventory, that's why I mentioned using a dummy character. You can have 50 inventories if you want

[Ziggy]

Thanks for the responses. I'll have to do some more research and see what I can come up with. I think I'll try my hand at making a small 3 or 4 room adventure using these ideas before diving in to the epic quest I have in mind.