Refining the Dialogue System (Amy)

Hello, everyone!  It's Amy, and today I'd like to show you a new update on the dialogue system I've been making.  Last time, I had a simple demonstration of the way NPC dialogue will be displayed on the screen.  Since then, I've been refining the system to make it more flexible, so that our designers can use it for a wider range of scenarios.  

One of the most important features we wanted to build in was the ability to offer the player choices that influence the path of the story.  To do that, I started by adding buttons to the user interface, which pop up at the end of a conversation.  By clicking one of the buttons, the player can start an entirely new conversation, with different lines of dialogue, although to the user it appears to be one fluid interaction.

These short conversations can be chained together to go on as long as the designers want to make them, to simulate natural dialogue.  The only limiting factor is how many different branches the writers are willing to account for.  They'll need to come up with unique responses for each possible combination of inputs, which will grow exponentially each time they offer the player a decision.  Sometimes it'll be better to cut things off before they go too far.

In the examples above, you can see that all of the dialogue options are binary, with simple choices between yes and no.  That's not very flexible for the writers, so I decided to push it a few steps further.  I modified the system to allow designers to change the number of buttons, and the text that's displayed on those buttons.  Now, my system can be used to display any conversation the writers can think of.