Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
This approach saves you a lot of duplicated effort if there are dialog options that
you want to occur every time the game waits for input, such as the “I'm finished
talking” option. You simply specify when they are added to the menu, and they
remain in the menu until they are deleted. It also lets you document conditional
responses, or conditional exchanges, easily by including
if
statements in the
Response and Action lines.
The system is also powerful, because each exchange is a separate item that you can
add to the menu any time you want to, instead of being part of a fixed collection of
exchanges as in Figure 7.5. However, with this power, as always, comes some risk.
It's much harder to read than a diagram like Figure 7.5, and it doesn't document
exactly what's on the screen at any given point. In order to find out what options
the player has at any point, you have to work your way through the whole conver-
sation, keeping track of which items are added and deleted as you go.
Benefits of Scripted Conversations
Although scripted conversation forces the player to say only the lines available in
the script, it produces a sequence of plausible remarks and replies. It also gives you
a way to illustrate both the avatar's and the NPC's personality through something
other than their appearance. You can write their lines in such a way that you give
them distinct personalities of their own. For instance, Guybrush Threepwood, the
hero of the
Monkey Island
games, uses phrases that reveal him as a wise guy who sel-
dom takes anything seriously. The character's vocabulary, grammar, dialect, and—
if the game features recorded audio—tone of voice and accent provide important cues.
The scripted conversation is not merely a mechanism for giving the player informa-
tion, however. It's a real part of the story, and the player's choices can have a distinct
effect on the progress of the game. If an NPC asks the player to entrust him with a
valuable secret, then the player's decision, whether to tell or not to tell, could have
far-reaching consequences. The player has to choose responses based on her assess-
ment of the NPC's character—to which you, the designer, must provide clues.
For a more detailed discussion of different ways of designing scripted conversa-
tions, read Chapter 14, “Dialogue Engines,” of the topic
Game Writing: Narrative
Skills for Videogames,
edited by Chris Bateman (Bateman, 2006). Bateman points out
that large dialog trees can be unwieldy to work with, and he proposes some simpler
alternatives. He is undoubtedly correct, but for complex conversations about a vari-
ety of subjects, the dialog tree offers you the most comprehensive scripting power.
A strict design rule, which first appeared in Chapter 3, “Game Concepts,” specifies
that you must not write the story during the concept stage of design but only later
during the elaboration stage. During the concept stage, your job is to define the
