Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
er cross it. This sounds a little bit abstract, but it becomes very obvious as soon as
you see the result. When the first character is talking, he is shown at one side of the
screen; when the second character begins to speak, he is always displayed on the
opposite side. You can check this out for yourself by watching any scene with dia-
logues in modern movies; recall for example, a famous conversation between Neo
and Morpheus in Matrix (1999) when they are sitting in red armchairs. Such a meth-
od of displaying the characters on the screen lets viewers naturally understand who
is speaking right now without any extra efforts. It works like an easy-to-recognize
pattern.
Iftheruleisbroken,theconversation sceneisperceivedlikeaseriesofmonologues,
as if the characters make some declarations but not communicate with each other:
SMS-like-chat dialogue window
The player may have several versions of the next phrase. They can be displayed like
individual panels with the text he taps on or look like a scrollable list of text. The last
option needs less space on the screen, but it also less visual as some phrases are
hidden. It is an interesting practice to keep the inventory panel so the player can use
some items from there in his conversation. For instance, by dragging a key from the
inventory to the dialogue window, the protagonist asks the NPC about a locked door.
It is important to note that besides a bunch of predefined phrases the player chooses
from, the game may utilize something like an emotional spectrum; instead of choos-
ing the exact words, the player selects an emotional state for his character. For in-
stance, he may be cool headed and delicate, or be aggressive and very rude. The
game selects directions on the conversation tree following these states.
Not every dialogue window in adventure games has the log feature, which allows to
look through the history of the current conversation; sometimes it can be very useful.
There is a way to combine the log and the window. I'm talking about a conversa-
tion between characters that looks like an SMS chat. Each phrase is presented as
