Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
and change, but that evolution should be explained and displayed properly. For in-
stance, in a game, there is a bonus that gives a protagonist some extra points. If it
suddenly begins to freeze the character, not being change visually, that will be the
distortion of the initial fact describing the bonus behavior that is a bad practice. Al-
ternatively, it is better to let a mischievous antagonist tell a false story through a dia-
logue, say for example, some bonuses are infected. With this, the player begins to
doubt, primarily about bonuses, then about the reliability of the antagonist's words.
Therefore, the adventures inside dialogues are not only about useful information and
the correct order of the conversation, but also about finding the truth. This is why
there are a lot of adventure games based on detective stories, where a lot of char-
acters tell lies, and the main objective is to reveal their true colors.
Constructing the conversation tree
Generally, all the dialogues are predefined structures constructed by a game deve-
loper. They cover all the possible variations and turns of the chat. Each phrase may
have several directions to be continued, and some sections are looped; there can
be different versions of an ending. This structure is called a dialogue or conversation
tree, as long as it starts with a straight line of nodes and then grows as the crown of
a tree through forking paths of phrases. From the mathematical point of view, this is
a directed graph. It is made of nodes (phrases) and edges (directions). The simplest
conversation tree consists of only phrases and links to other nodes, wherein some
of them are marked as NPC's phrases but others (node's children) belong to the
protagonist. It can be considered as some form of a "red-black" tree, a data struc-
ture, where nodes have special color marks(either black orred), and children always
have the color opposite to that of the parent. Such a method is very visual.
A player surfs the branches of the conversation tree by choosing phrases for the
main character, so the focus is shifted from node to node, moving deeply into the
crown. The game interprets NPC's nodes as static text but protagonist's nodes as
