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[Dinomaniak]

In september, me and the small team I work with are starting to work on a turn based RPG game in the style of XCom, but with top down pixel art.
One of the very important parts of the game is the story, which will be quite strong, psychologically speaking (18+), and it will have a strong relevance on the outcome of the game.
The biggest problem I have, and what I could use some advice on is : how would I go about implementing the story in such a manner that it'd give the user a strong feeling, and feel appropriate withing the game.

My options so far are :
- use voice actors for lines - the most major downside I see here is that it may not fit together with the visuals (pixel art). It could be somewhat avoided by bringing the character's bust up while they talk.
- identical to the previous option, but give the player the option to choose if they want voice added or not
- no voice whatsoever, and use only walls of text - the downside is, nobody wants to read, and since the story and choices are directly relevant to the outcome, I see this as a bad implementation
- make ALL of the events in the story into cut scenes, and use voice for these
- add cut scenes for the main/important events to alleviate the work amount, and voice with bust for every single part of the story

What do you think ?

[Cobralad]

evaluate your budget, think about pacing inside a game. this is police 2 is nice example how not to do things.

[Superb Joe]

Spooky Vincent Price narration

[Dorcan]

I think that in order to have true horror you need the player to feel for your characters before anything terrible can happen to them. So in order to do so you would need moments where the player can interact with them or know more about their story and their motivations.

And I don't think voice over is the solution. It's the situation that has to be horrific, so animations, visuals or texts are good enough, and most of the time imagination is the strongest factor. And voice over are tricky, they can make the whole experience cringeworthy if not perfectly done.

Some ideas:

• During the mission, the characters could drop some lines that are relative to the current story at the beginning or at some event point which would define their attitude
• Between missions (when they are finally safe !), maybe they could open up with some dialog system. That way, you can have long conversations with lots of text but only if the player chooses to.
• You could also have lots of collectibles that can be inspected, and their description would inform the player on the lore. Or even better, give secrets informations about the characters and unlock dialogs.
• When a character gets fatally wounded during a mission, you could integrate the dialog system at the end of the mission where you could exchange last words before the character dies, making it a strong moment for the player. He could also give you a final request (additional mission ?).
• And for the cutscenes, yeah I agree they should be very short and with as few texts as possible. But you could have many of them inside a single mission.