Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
▪
Creating interesting/entertaining incidental background dialogue/
conversations
Game missions are sometimes crafted almost to a moment-to-moment
level of detail, while others are more “loose” and systemic in style. But
most missions in games that feature VO rely in some way on scripted VO
to help clarify and contextualize gameplay, especially with regard to events
that will definitely happen every time a player experiences that mission.
The process I've seen work best looks something like this (your mileage
may vary depending on your tools and pipelines). It involves three key
team members: the
mission designer
, a
narrative designer
, and an
audio
designer
.
1. Mission Design and Narrative come to agreement on gameplay and
story content and objectives for the mission up front, in the mis-
sion's early documentation phase. All is detailed in a Level Design
Document (LDD).
2. Once there is a fully playable version of the level, the mission de-
signer, narrative designer, and audio designer sit down and play
through it together, making notes as to where scripted VO might be
needed or desired and what the function of each line or conversa-
tion should be. This process can be referred to as “blocking.”
3. The narrative designer creates a document (probably a spreadsheet)
that lists all the planned scripted dialogue, their trigger events, and a
rough pass placeholder line (or something more final) for each one.
4. At this stage, the mission designer is commonly tasked with insert-
ing “hooks” into the mission that programmatically call the blocked-
out VO lines to play at the right moments, based on the designated
trigger events.
5. Someone—depending on the specifics of the pipeline—imports the
lines into the build via a process that also auto-generates place-
holder VO files; possibly robotic-sounding text-to-speech versions
for the time being. Combined with the mission designer's “hooks,”
the lines should now be playing in the mission when they're sup-
posed to.
6. The mission designer, narrative designer, and audio designer evalu-
ate the current state of the mission and agree on any changes with
