Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
that when two persons are speaking, they are not using very complex constructions
in their conversation because they illustrate many things not by words but by body
language, mimics, and gestures. Many of these details can be recreated using an-
imation or graphic representation of different character's emotions.
If in a story a character is long, it must be split into smaller parts; thus it takes few
steps for the story to be told. It is worth mentioning that a protagonist can take part
in storytelling by asking some leading questions, which include some portions of a
narrative. This reduces the number of steps required to express a plot of the con-
versation. If a sentence is cut and may be continued, it should be marked with an
ellipsis. The protagonist's phrase to continue the story can include expressions such
as "Please, continue..." "I want to know more," and "I'm all ears".
But there can also be some exceptions. For the sake of drama, to express a char-
acter's nature, he can use phrases written in a totally wrong manner. For example,
there is a hero, who is very dry as dust and egotistical. He is able to speak for hours
admiring himself. His phrases can be very long and pretentiously constructed, fea-
turing splendid metaphors and pompous descriptions. In this case, the exact mean-
ing of the sentences is not quite important. The goal is to tire players with a flood of
words so they share the idea that a talking character is a boring person.
There are several ways to draw additional attention to the text or some of its parts.
Theworldofadvertisingiswellfamiliarwiththem.Keywordsinasentenceshouldbe
visually isolated from other elements. This can be done by color or other typograph-
ical emphasis such as bold or italic font styles, letter spacing (extra spaces between
letters), and underlining. Such methods work fine and are pretty effective, however,
they require special technical implementation; a text parser used in a game should
support special style tags as well as the system displaying the text on the screen.
