Development Update#16 Improving Presentation of Budget Dialogue 
Example of ellipsis slower typewriter effect and 'yell' state.
Improving the dialogue system in Jalopy (Name change, I'll go into it next week when I've done a formal announcement).
So the dialogue system in Jalopy is something that’s been a right pain to get right.
Budget restrictions meant that recording VO for the game was out of the question, which poses some challenges for a game where player attention is focused towards the driving and maintenance of their car. So reading while driving is something that would need to keep focus on the car.
So essentially, this means no dialogue trees, and no direct replies. I’m a big fan of the silent protagonist in games. It’s far more interesting to communicate with a games systems through the manipulation of embedded mechanics - Half - Life 2′s pick up the can proved this a long time ago.
So the foundations of a solution are there for me, thanks Valve. Dialogue in Jalopy will work in that, characters will monologue to the player, while the player’s actions whilst driving will affect their delivery. Drive too fast and you’ll make them nervous, don’t want to listen to them talk any more, then turn on the radio and whack it up to full volume - they’ll soon take the hint.
These kind of ambiguous interactions are hard to pick up on, or understand mechanically, but when you notice your actions having an affect on AI it feels really magical.
With this foundation in place, next comes the presentation.
Without VO, I need to really focus on presentation. Started with text on the screen but without the aid of surround sound it was difficult to detect who was saying what. So then I added in the speech bubble, which points towards each characters mouth to show which actor is currently talking.
I originally didn’t want the player to have any agency with conversations, but this would lead to missing reading some of the dialogues, so I added a typewriter effect that can be sped up whilst holding the L mouse button, and the requirement to accept a read message by pressing the L mouse button. I don’t feel it’s too demanding for when you’re driving, you still maintain full control of the car.
Next I fine tuned the presentation. I made exceptions for when the system finds an ellipsis, bold or italics in the script files, and narrates them accordingly (ellipsis slow down the typewriter effect [fig 1], bold appears bold [fig2], etc). Added transitional effects, Yell state [fig 2] (bubble shake) and audio and called it a day.
I thought I’d share the process for this because it was a right state last week, so much so that I just didn’t want to be involved in the narrative of the game. Now I’ve improved the presentation and polished it up a bit, it’s something that I enjoy being involved with.
So yeah, hope that was insightful.
Greg
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