I have been busy writing more dialogue for the game this week. Already, I am noticing how time-consuming it is to write branching dialogue. You can spend a long time writing pages of dialogue, which the player may only see a small portion of. It’s a lot of work but I’m very much enjoying the challenge, and chance to flex my creative-writing muscles! To aid me with my writing, I have checked out some interesting Gamasutra articles. I read a fascinating article on how developers approach the design and writing of their characters (Bradley, 2018). It seems that there is no one set way to approach this – with some developers moulding their characters to fit into the world and narrative, whereas others shape the narrative around the characters and their abilities. As my project is very much led by the characters you interact with (to the extent that their reactions to you directly impact your stats), I chose to employ the latter approach. I also read an article about the role of a writer in within a game development team, and how it is often important to keep them in the loop at all stages of design (McDevitt, 2010). While I am not in a team for this project, it was interesting to consider, and will certainly benefit me in my team projects moving forward.

This week I have made a custom Say Dialog to hold each character’s speech, name, and icon (fig. 1). As you can see, it uses a similar colour palette to the backgrounds and character portraits, fitting in with the aesthetic style of the game. The character’s portrait has also been moved to sit in the centre of the screen, drawing more attention towards them. I am really happy with how this looks and think it is a big improvement over Fungus’ default Say Dialogs. I originally wanted to present the stats within the ‘say dialogue’, but the interface quickly became too messy, negatively affecting the user experience. I think I will have them visible in the corner of the screen instead, to be less obtrusive to the player. Keeping Jeff’s previous theory lecture on UI and UX in mind, I still think it would be a great idea to have the UI look ‘fleshy’ but this would have to be in such a way that it does not detract from the legibility of the text. Perhaps I could employ a grayscale look similar to the character portraits. I will make sure to look into this once I am further along with the script and art assets.

(Above) Figure 1: The new custom say dialog made to better fit in with the game’s aesthetics.

This week’s theory workshop was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed going into the breakout rooms with fellow designers and creating some speedy concepts. The combination of a time limit and certain constraints made for a highly creative environment in which we were all bouncing ideas off one another. For this reason, I can understand the popularity of game jams, and would love to take part in one in the future. It was also interesting to think of games as constantly moving between different states. I’ll make sure to consider this for my current project.

Next week I will continue to write for the script, and make some more art for the characters to be implemented into the Unity project.

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