Weekly update #31

Art

Amnukhel is equal amounts of unsettling and goofy. I sometimes render a 3d environment for the background and finish it with an overpainting. This whole thing is still unfinished and very dead looking.

Dev spotlight

Character workshop, part 3: Dialogue layout

I have a preference for a particular shape of the dialogue tree when writing my characters. The basic pieces are: 

• Intro: This is the first piece of dialogue and story the player experiences when they meet the character. Basically an unavoidable meet and greet. This is where I usually force the player and the character to divulge their names to each other so there's no continuity problems when NPC or PC use the names. The intro usually leads directly into the main conversation hub.
• Conversation hub: This is the "Default" state of the NPC. When the player visits the character after the initial intro I dump them here after a quick hello. This hub also contains the [Questions] prompt and anything else immediately relevant (player reporting how a quest went, etc).
• Questions Hub: A place to store lore or further inquiries about the character or other characters the player can come up with. Basically anything that the player could plausibly ask from the character. A lot these questions are just random lore filler or semi serious hijinks, but I often use the player's questions as triggers for other content.
• Loops: These are the conversations that the player has with the NPCs that eventually return to either hub. They're ideally multi-ended things that sprawl into different directions based on the dialogue choices, affecting the player's relationship with the NPC.

In this case I've broken the story layout into four phases. Note the collapsible script language stuff.

You might notice that nothing in this scripting connects or makes sense as a sequence. I usually write random dialogue snippets that I want to include in the character interactions first, and figure out the rest later. These snippets often unfold as the player asks questions about the character or as the character comments about something with possible player responses keeping the topic of the conversation alive.

The general concept in this case is fairly straightforward and simple. The character comes up to the player, there's casual conversation and flirting from both sides and at the "end" there might be sex. The concept doesn't need to be any more complex or subtle than that. Subtlety and complexity come from the details of the dialogue and the writing. Making a simple outline for the interaction is a good way to start the writing, so you can get to the meaty and interesting parts.