Dead State Design Update
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Category: News ArchiveHits: 1432
I'm primarily writing dialogue for the game right now. One of the most exciting/frustrating aspects of game writing for me is figuring out which options the player would naturally want to take in certain conversations, and making sure that the choices in dialogue are going to lead to satisfying and meaningful branching in the narrative. The easiest way to do this is with a series of binary like/hate, good/bad, help/hurt kinds of choices, but in this game we have long-term consequences to multiple decisions made with characters and the alternate influence of your handling of their friends/loved ones. Some allies are major figures in the shelter and wield (power) due to their skill or authority, and many of these are the most complex and dynamic of the shelter's inhabitants structurally. Some allies are not overly complex characters, which makes them the easiest characters to both manage in the game and finish dialogue for. It's a priority for us to make these characters feel real and also that the shelter is an active society, with all the different types of personalities and motivations you would expect from a collection of people from different social backgrounds forced to exist together.
But there is always the concern when plotting out routes through a character's multiple arcs that there are too few real choices/paths the character can take. The (too few) option makes writing and tracking events very easy for the writer, but ultimately leaves the player feeling like the game isn't responding at all to their choices in the game. A good example is when a dialogue almost always plays out the same way, no matter which dialogue option you pick, save one (you must choose) line. This usually is done to save on VO costs and also because most people don't pick up that they are making a choice unless the game spells it out for them. Sometimes this manifests as a major character who you feel the writer strongly wants you to feel a specific way about, because no matter what you say the relationship veers in one direction - usually for dramatic purposes, like you should feel sad when this character dies/betrays you/romances you, etc.
With character dialogue, there's also the need to hold back a bit so that the branching doesn't become so complex that only 5% of the people playing will ever see a whole section of dialogue.Why it might seem that (as many options as possible) would be optimal, the complexity, especially in a game like Dead State where we are not a very linear game, makes the dialogue creation and implementation process take much longer for diminishing appreciation. At a certain point, players feel like they are (missing) too much content, so I prefer to keep it to 2-3 fully-formed different types of relationship arcs a player can have with a single NPC. Usually within those relationships, there can be some slight flavor differences depending on when choices were made or what other characters might have been involved in those choices. All of this has to be tracked and flow naturally, so it needs to branch carefully or risk becoming a logistical nightmare. If we're doing it right, you'll think of these characters as people, not switches, and that's where we want the drama/emotion coming from, not just because we fabricated it.
