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[Nillo]

I once worked on an RPG project that never saw the light of day. (Shocking, I know.) In that RPG, the main character was a simple adventurer on a quest to vanquish some generic evil threat. The twist of the story was that he was not opposed to the existence of monsters; in fact, the evil he was aiming to defeat was someone who had found a way to completely eliminate monsters from his world. You see, adventurers thrive on monsters - they give gold, items, experience and all sorts of good stuff. So the relation between the adventurer and the monsters in that story was like the relation between a hunter and his game - hunters don't hate animals, but they need food.

To further emphasize this "monsters aren't evil" theme, the adventurer had a monster as a companion. This monster was a sentient slime - you know, the kind of slime that's usually the weakest enemy the player will encounter in an RPG. It would be incapable of speech, but intelligent and respond to his owner's commands. I also wanted it to have a primitive form of body language, which the adventurer was able to interpret in order to see how the slime was feeling.

This was a pretty big challenge to write, and probably one of the main reasons I ended up dropping the project. How would you use the body language of a character to express a wide variety of emotions - in particular characters with strange shapes such as this slime? I considered a simple list of verbs which represented certain feelings (for example "the slime bubbles" means that it is happy, "the slime sizzles" means that it is angry, etc) but it felt like I could have done something much more interesting than that.

[Nuprahtor]

There is a similliar slime character in Squidi.net Modest Destiny
Look at the smiles (slime-smile - what a pun!) - there is only two eyes and a mouth, but they expresses wide variety of emotions quite well 

[justinfic]

A lot of games from the NES/SNES era had silent characters-- their actions just have to speak louder than words. I'm assuming you have some sort of visual element to the storytelling-- like a top-down screen with sprites a la Final Fantasy 1-6 that can have stage directions as well as simply speak. I think you would need a good system for that, as well as a nice range of sprites for the slime, to let it be a more endearing character. Or have him be useful to the gameplay in many ways-- like the blob from a Boy and His Blob.

If all you're using to tell the story is text-- and relying on literally displaying the text "The blob sizzles" I don't think that could work. If you're doing just text, or text and talking heads, I'd say just have the slime speak, and make him by far the most eloquent and well-spoken character in the game 

[Nillo]

You're probably right. I'm more of a writer than an artist, so my games tend to make heavy use of text as a tool for storytelling and gameplay. I suppose it is at least a little reassuring to know I made the right decision of dropping the project, instead of working on something there was no way I could finish.

I envisioned the slime as a character that's initially hard for the player to understand, since they are unfamiliar with how it reacts to things and what those reactions mean, but as they progressed in the game they would learn its "language" and be able to tell how it felt about things.

[CiroContinisio]

I envisioned the slime as a character that's initially hard for the player to understand, since they are unfamiliar with how it reacts to things and what those reactions mean, but as they progressed in the game they would learn its "language" and be able to tell how it felt about things.

But does the player start to understand the character through some gesture he makes, some expressions, some sounds, or does he actually start speaking?
Because there's a big difference between the two.

[Nillo]

But does the player start to understand the character through some gesture he makes, some expressions, some sounds, or does he actually start speaking?
Because there's a big difference between the two.

Nope, no speaking. I thought I made that clear with the title of this topic.

What I mean is that the player would begin to see the connection between certain gestures/actions and what they mean in the non-speaking character's body language.

[McMutton]

Well done animation can convey emotion even if the character has no human features.

[SundownKid]

In that situation, I would probably use emoticons. Probably easier and cheaper than making a bunch of animations for your Slime that the player may or may not notice. Also, they can have a "?" if the player does not understand them yet.

[bart_the_13th]

In that situation, I would probably use emoticons. Probably easier and cheaper than making a bunch of animations for your Slime that the player may or may not notice. Also, they can have a "?" if the player does not understand them yet.

This.

[Bishop]

Red Dead Redemption and Fable both spoke how the horse and dog weren't fully obedient to give a sense of them being full characters rather than another tool the player has. In the pokemon games they might as well be AK47's for all the feel will they exhibit and the emotional connect you get.

[anonymous]

I'm in the mood of talking about sounds and colors - in persona when having conversations with monsters, for instance the slime - there was sound [nothing intelligible] for sad/anger/happiness/interest that accompanied body language that also accompanied color along with text.  various means of communicating to the player emotions.

[Jace Boechler]

This kinda only applies to your slime character instead of 'all silent characters' but one thing you could have done was made the slime transform into things that conveyed how it felt. Like, it could have become spiky when angry or slumped into a puddle when it was sad. Really, I'm just saying the same thing as everyone else though, that being animation and body movement would be really important.

I'm familiar with this problem as a character in my game doesn't speak as well, but they're humanoid so that makes things easier.

[RamSteelwood]

Anonymous is maybe getting at the same thing, but maybe just colour code the slime to keep it simple for you?  turns red if angry, blue if sad, green if happy, yellow if hungry, purple if jealous, orange with a hint of green when mildly perplexed, pink when horny...ok, maybe that's going too far!

[Nillo]

A very good idea. I'll keep it in mind if I ever pick this project up again.

Even if I don't have the time to make this RPG in the future, maybe the suggestions in this thread will be useful to someone else.

[Enker]

Some major franshise still use this, Dragon Quest and Pokemon among them - though I love to see good character development in games I think that a good script can allow for a silent protagonist. Though I wonder, do choices made for that character by the player to direct the conversation lines or game path count as speech?

[eyeliner]

Take a lot at the recent-ish Zeldas, for instance, the characters "Hey!", "Huh?", "Aahh!"to draw your attention. There's an example for non speaking sounds that can be used to form a basic way to communicate.

Visually, I really liked the way Suikoden I and II convey character's emotions and reactions. They rotate in place when happy, jump when surprised/shocked, steam when pissed. I always liked that system more than words and to me they represent the best it can be done without voice-over or even text. You just look at the screen and know what's going on.