The Story Begins - The Game Maker's Companion: Game Development - page 326

Setting a Prisoner Free

Archie: You know, your mother would have just knocked the guy on the head and grabbed his
badge while he slept.
Flynn: Maybe so… But I'm not my mother.

Keeping Track of What the Player Knows
If you think about the design so far, there is actually quite a lot of the story the player can actually
miss.

• We don't force the player to go back to talk to the first prisoner once he's down, so the

player might miss hearing Raffi's name the first time.

• Clicking on the posters is optional and the player might miss these altogether.

The player might miss the speech that gets triggered while he is jumping around-the
two guards talking to each other, for instance.
This is completely by choice. We have added extra story and information for players who like
to investigate. But they are perfectly free to race ahead.
If you leave information in your game that is optional, such as the wanted poster, then be
careful if you refer back to it at a later point. It can be hard to keep track of these things, but will
be very rewarding for the player. If a player has actually read this poster, then they could later use
that information to gain access to the sheriff. We can give Flynn the option to say that he has
come about the reward. Feeding back to the player in this manner is a nice touch, as it rewards
them for being observant earlier on.
Make sure that all the information that is vital to game play and vital to understanding the
story isn't placed where the player can by-pass it. For instance, while we do have to save the first
prisoner in order to progress (the extra platform doesn't appear until we have unlocked the
wheel), the player can choose to not go down and talk to him again. So we need to place any vital
information in the first conversation and not the second. If you want the player to hear the
second bit as well, then you need to make sure that they can't progress without hearing it. Keep
your eye on these things. It's perfectly fine to let the player miss some of the dialogue (in fact it's
nice to let them choose how much they'd care to listen to), as long as they never get stuck
because they didn't get a certain piece of information.

•

Implementing Dialogue
Most of methods we used to implement the traps and puzzles should be fairly familiar to you and
by now we hope you would be able to expand upon these without too much difficulty. However,
creating conversation trees is something completely new, so we will go into this in more detail.
We'll begin by looking at how the dialogue script is created, and then look at the finer details of
displaying text on the screen one word at a time.

Scripting Dialogues
The way the dialogue system works is completely independent from the rest of the game, so we
can actually work in a completely different .gmk file to illustrate how it operates. In addition to
branching dialogue, we want a neat-looking text system that displays the lines spoken by the
characters one word at a time—as you expect in this kind of game.