Designing dialogue sections for video games
Reading a lot about Inkle led me to think about what I need - a robust dialogue solution. It may be branching dialogue for starters, I don't plan to revolutionize it too soon 😉
So far I cannot answer whether Inkle will help here, so consider this a random excuse to talk game design.
When I think about dialogue in games I see a broad spectrum beginning with J-RPGs like Final Fantasy and their NPCs repeating one sentence repeatedly and ending with parametrized (RPG dialogues. Between them are linear scenes with no player choice typical for any story, and the game dialogue equivalent of a slasher movie where instead of cute girls you remove dialogue options.
When thinking about what I want to achieve in games using dialogue, I tend to imagine the dialogue segment as a minigame itself (or a black box), kinda like this:
You pass a set of values to it:
every boolean flag that represents a game story event
every item you currently have in the inventory
every opened guest info
every quest info related to this person
what state of the psyche is the protagonist now, and what he was during the last conversation
You get the gist!
Then, the magic happens! The minigame of conversation, based on the rules I design for the given game, or maybe even a minigame. And once the conversation ends, the minigame returns everything that happened during that conversation:
achieved goals
side effects
acquired items, etc.
The dialogue designed like a level is not new, you can encounter it in Subsurface Circular by Bithell games.
Nice game, but I don't enjoy loops in dialogue that much 😊
So last thing that is left is to
Define MAGIC
And here that would depend on the game I'd be making, and to be honest, not all of them lead to a dialogue tree.
Sometimes I dream of making games that give the player a choice before the dialogue.
What if the dialogue would go differently depending on...
what background did you give your character during character creation?
which side characters did you pick as travel companions?
what course of action did you pick during other sections of the game?
Sure, branching dialogue with options to pick is fun, but I think these days that choices should be even more subtle, maybe.
What do you think?