DEALING WITH NPC CROWDS

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This has been discussed before, I think: how to deal with "crowding".

I have this map that is a party in a night club, and the party was organized by the player. The better he organized the party, the more people are there. So it's important that the map accounts for lots of NPCs. Thing is, there are some of them that are important to talk to... most of them aren't. And I'm not sure I have enough creativity to come up with unimportant lines for 100+ guys.

I want you guys' opinion on this solution I came up with.

I'm making a common event with a list of random lines (like 10). Something like "yeah baby!", or "great party!". I will make those lines short, and with a different font color (so the player will know they're random and unimportant). The somewhat important NPCs will speak normally. But nothing will distinguish them from the outside (except I'll used a limited number of different charsets for the random guys, and some other NPCs will have exclusive sprites). I expect players to spend some time talking to useless people like that, but not much time (especially cause the lines will be short).

What do you think? Is that a good solution?
It's not a bad idea. If it was me trying to design and work my way around it, I would probably try to cut down on the amount of NPC's to probably "30 - 50ish" so the player doesn't have to spend a ton of time trying to find the right NPC at the party to proceed to the next part. (time wasting is BAD) Besides, trying to come up with a ton of different, but generally useless conversations for all those different characters may tend to repeat themselves and may lose their initial appeal.

I suppose you could always "hide" some the NPC's by having a ton of them dancing on the floor or having them hide behind the bar, etc. so you can see them in the background but can't physically talk to them, which will reduce the amount of NPC's the player will have to talk to.

Either way, my two cents.

Oh, and, BTW, calunio, this night club scene BETTER BE A-ROCKIN'! ^^
Sated makes a good point, group dialogues are good, but don't rely on them.

My personal opinion would be to keep the actual number of npcs you can talk to very low. If you organize the map right, you can section off groups of npcs to make them inaccessible to speak with... put them behind a bar or something then make the excuse that since the bar is so overcrowded, you can't get in. It's justifiable, doesn't interrupt the flow of the game, and adds a little bit of humor to the game.
I agree with Mr_H.

I liked the way Earthbound handled this, the Happy Happy Village Headquarters comes to mind. There's a huge crowd of cult members in a giant building, but only very few you can actually talk to. You can tell which ones you can talk to just because their sprite walks sliightly differently than the others.

You could also make an icon float above an important character to show that they're important, depending on how obvious you want to be about it.
Since it's important to talk to the right NPC, you may want to consider some sort of indicator for this scene (like a flashing arrow over the NPC's head, or something to make them stand out). Usually it's not needed, but in a crowd of 30+, I think it would be necessary to reduce the frustration.

As others said, have them in groups where they are talking back and forth the first time around, and the playing character listens in, and then after that when he goes back a second time around a message could state "The conversation is of no interest to you."

In fact, you could mix it up between your "Yeah baby! / What a party!" comments with comments that "It's too loud to hear what they are saying" or "The man/woman/transvestite does not acknowledge you."

Whatever you do, I'd advise you against an NPC that doesn't say anything, because then it makes it hard for the player to decide who is going to say what, and who will not say anything at all, or if it's a bug in the event and was set to below versus "same as".
Well, one simple way to reduce the workload is being a tad realistic and just have a bunch of them ignore the player character's attempt to talk to them. As in, have the game say that they are ignoring you (rather than nothing happening). Then copy and paste that throughout the area, switching up the character graphic.
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