Reactive narrative makes games feel more realistic and immersive.
This video explains systemic game design and how to apply it for more reactive narratives.
In the context of The Sandbox, we can think of the term “flag” used in the video as “tags” applied to objects.
Tags are used for directing and filtering messages granularly for cause and effect.
This can be used to create classes of NPCs with similar roles to drive the player actions. Asker behaviors could be created for classes of NPCs, such as the Antiquarian mentioned in the video. This would reveal a system in your game, but it’s a worthy trade-off for the more immersive and reactive feel the game would offer to players.
Once you have a general system in place, you can modify it for other types of systems. This will mean logic and dialogue set up with Game Maker’s objectives/quests, Rules, and behaviors and components applied to objects to design your own system/mechanic. This may include what NPCs say, how they may change behavior or speech depending on the player’s reputation, how objects react upon collision with certain tags, etc.
could this be precursor to a dialog and tag system where you could add and remove custom tags in game … via a component?