Dialogue and Narrative

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Hi!

I’d like to get started with the first Dialogue drafts for the story.

I’m also thinking of possible solutions to making this easier to collaborate on if more people want to have input or do it concurrently. Here are some options I can think of:

  • Google Spreadsheet - seems to be quite a common solution to dialogue, albeit a little clunky. Built-in version control and seems quite easy to translate into the game, but it could get pretty convoluted (although maybe not for a game of this scale)
  • Google Docs - slightly less organized when comapred to the Spreadsheet, but the concept remains the same.
  • Twine - pretty good for branching dialogues and writing out the flow of the story in general; however, difficult to collaborate on as there is no concurrent editing and so the story would need to be exported and re-imported as a file by different people (but we could let Git handle this). Also uses a form of markdown, but it’s pretty simple.
  • LegendKeeper - currently in beta but it’s free if I generate invite links for people (please note this will require an email invite). This tool is more intended for World Building but it offers some nice structuring options such as sub-pages and quite a few formatting tools. It might be useful for dialogue too and has collaborative editing similar to the Google suite.

Please let me know if anyone has any other suggestions for tools! I think partially this choice might depend on whether we want to have branching dialogue in the game or not (i.e. multiple dialogue options that might lead to different responses). Would love to hear what everyone thinks :slight_smile:

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Thanks for kicking off the discussion about narrative, Proudrunner.

In my proposal, dialogues are generally linear and not branching, mostly since I wanted to keep it simple. However, I’m totally open to pumping up the narrative - as long as its reflected in the gameplay in a meaningful way. But I’m sure you already know that!

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All the dialogue values are going to need to be in a database and/or JSON file eventually anyhow, right? Seems like Google Sheets would be the easiest stepping stone towards that.

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As far as the narrative, let’s break down the story beats that have already been established.

Right now we have a classic tale of an explorer discovering an indigenous culture and community, initially being in opposition to their old and foreign ways, then learning to harmonize his “advanced” mentality with their naturalistic culture.

We also have an imminent catastrophe that has upset the balance of the native Islander culture. The Pig Chef clashing with the Forest Eye visualizes this direct conflict.

The Pig Chef uses the social tools of force and subterfuge in order to gain access to the ancient knowledge of the Islander culture, only to discover that he has to meaningfully embrace their culture in order to achieve his goal of obtaining the recipe.

Now armed with an appreciation for the ways of the Forest Eye, Pig Chef starts his quest of procuring each ingredient by hunting critters on The Island.

As the Eye King guides the Pig Chef towards finding ingredients for the recipe, the Chef has a series of increasing challenging encounters with island critters that result in the Pig Chef obtaining the rare Phoenix chick.

The ritual is successful, catastrophe is averted, and the Pig Chef leaves the Island having made allies of the Forest Eye and their King.

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A few questions immediately come to mind based on these story beats.

Do the Forest Eye consider the Pig Chef as the reason for this imminent catastrophe? It could deepen their motivation for conflict with the Chef. This narrative point will directly affect how the Forest Eye interact and speak to the Pig Chef.

Does the Pig Chef first try to fight the Eye King in a futile attempt to use force to obtain his goal? After his failed attempts to fight the Eye King, the Pig Chef could then be forced to use diplomacy in order to progress.

Once the Pig Chef and the Forest Eye are on the same page, the rest of the tension in the game is seemingly a race against the clock to help the Forest Eye with their ritual before catastrophe strikes. How is this imminent catastrophe visualized?

Is the character of the Bard Hare a mystical kind of creature who teaches the Pig Chef the value of appreciating Islander culture?

Is the Bard from the Forest Eye tribe, or does the Bard represent another humanoid species on The Island that knows of the Forest Eye culture, but observes it from outside of their community?

Is the Phoenix chick the most important critter that the Pig Chef obtains? Presumably obtaining this baby critter should be his final struggle on the map, unless the ritual itself will also have some gameplay conflict?

Was there perhaps a mama Phoenix guarding her offspring? Or perhaps if we want to avoid a full blown adult Phoenix, something else was guarding the Phoenix chick?

If we really wanted to dial up the tension, a twist could be that the Bard Hare wants the Phoenix chick for itself, so the final battle could be between the Pig Chef and the Bard Hare.

The third act of the story might be missing a main source of antagonism, other than the imminent catastrophe, which might be hard to visualize to the player without punishing them with something like timed trials to collect critters.

Also, uh… is he cooking the critters to make these ingredients?

  • “he leaves the island with his newfound recipe, and a few critters as ingredients”
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In the Level Design thread , I had asked how the player would know why the Pig Chef was going to that island, and @michaelgrilo brought up a good point about the story being in media res, and that makes sense. Is it too much for the Pig Chef to have thought bubbles to explain instead of a cut scene?

To address the first story beat question, is it too cliche for the Forest Eye to have a “prophecy” and that’s why they think Pig Chef is the cause of the catastrophe? This could build into some thread where the Forest Eye believe the Pig Chef to be some kind of evil entity/deity, which could tie into [mention|xFk5/jIJcnkuLb3PHTX+lQ==]'s idea from the Combat thread about Pig Chef utilizing mud as a disguise, perhaps to trick the Eye King into giving up the recipe.

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Just realizing the similarities between this idea and The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, at least the starting of the story. :smile:

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just a question ,how complex do you need the dialogue system to be if we had speed ,color and other effects applied to the whole sentence instead of individual words would that be ok ?

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Interesting train of thought @michaelgrilo thank you for sharing your process. Drawing on your reflections, I am adding mine from a level design’s perspective (of course everyone jumping in should keep in mind this is just a discussion, we are not taking decisions ourselves and some things are early to be concerned about/we might not get answers just yet):

  • There is this imminent catastrophe that the natives fear of. So far the kind of catastrophe they are expecting is abstract/not defined and all we know is that a specific ritual can save them. Should we delve into that more?

How is this prejudice affecting their lives? Should we care about what form would that catastrophe take? Could this upcoming danger become visualized (and justified) on the map somehow keeping our protagonist alert that something is indeed happening/coming?

An example: fear of a potential volcano eruption (there’s no volcano in the story though, don’t take this seriously, it’s just one common synapse when linking the words tropical island+natives+imminent danger, might as well be a tsunami, or draught, or storm, or any physical catastrophe, or it could even be a supernatural-divine one)

  • We also have an indigenous culture and community. It would be nice to discuss what kind of habits/life they might be living and how this gets depicted on the environment! What kind of homes did they build? Since they live in fear, have they made themselves a more protective structure - if there even is any structure?

I guess that since they are superstitious, believe in higher powers and their king lives in a Temple, having for example some altars scattered around the map would make sense.

  • I also like how you point out that it seems like our protagonist is acting as having an “advanced” mentality (loved the quotes). Getting some NierAutomata vibes.

  • Nice how you stressed the tools of force and subterfuge mentioned by Unity in the story as social, as these seem to describe 2 different kind of gameplay options regarding the player’s preferences. (1. a more aggressive approach, 2. a more peaceful or stealth approach), with obvious consequences to the level design.

  • How is the transition between defeating the Forest Eyes and actually coming to terms with them in order to obtain the recipe happen? After he is agreed to help them, how are the Forrest Eyes interacting with him then? Will the previous gameplay (aggressive/more peaceful-stealthy) have any effect on this?

  • Kudos for mentioning the Bard, as he is one of our first encounters and it would be good to have some more info in order to make a proper welcome for the character in our starting beach setup.

PS: I think the Phoenix is the Pig’s companion and not a critter that he finds later in a game. You can see it depicted in the character’s concept art and is also mentioned in the Beach tutorial level as Phoenix tutorial where you learn to burn some canes with it (since it’s a Phoenix I guess it can make fire).

@shuttle127 thanks for the reference link! And for addressing the Combat thread.
Cheers.

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Hey everyone I’m really new to this but very motivated and excited to help. Jumping straight to the storyline here’s an idea based on a lot of info the rest of you contributed already. Let me know if any of it will work. And if not that’s fine as well.

  • Pig lands on the island by accident after the sail fails and the ship drifts inland. He has no control of the ship and it wrecks.
  • Eye King’s name is rEye King and they foresaw a pig arriving to finally destroy the last rye bread they have. The reason being that they originally learned how to make the bread from a pig chef in the past who left when the Eye King (Who later renamed himself rEye king) became obsessed with the power of making the bread. When the king died he takes the secret with him and told no one because of his greed. In his reign, he left ancient stories written on the walls of the temple about how a mighty pig stole the power of the rEye king and left one last bread for the people to remember him by.
  • Pig lands on the beach meets the Bard (I feel there should be an adverse on the beach to first practice skills on, maybe crabs?) then goes into the forest. Eye king already saw him land and sends first minions (forest eyes).
  • Critters start bad but later become common folk of the village.
  • Heading to the temple the King catches you and now forces you to make a deal. You must recreate the bread to give the power back to the people he stole it from or perish.
  • Pig agrees because he became friends with a critter in town and wants to help. Everyone is hungry due to living off leaves.
  • Searches area to find the ingredients but needs hints from a few critters in the village.

I’ll stop there in case it’s too much. But I feel the ingredient can be pretty easy to determine from there. The only reason I chose rye bread is cause I thought of rye and eye rhymes. :smile:

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I’m very much up to helping in this area. I’m going to get up to speed with the project and other peoples ideas before I suggest anything but please count me in! :slight_smile:

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I am here to help with dialogue where I can. It seems like some things, like Bard Hare’s poem, may be dependent on level design. I also am not 100% clear on the intended gameplay so not sure how Chef Pig will overcome things. Is the idea of “force” directly fighting, or more challenge based? Does the character have a skill that is cooking adjacent (i.e. knife throwing, fire making, medicine making) or are most of the challenges cooking-based?

@michaelgrilo
Is the character of the Bard Hare a mystical kind of creature who teaches the Pig Chef the value of appreciating Islander culture?

I think it makes sense for Bard Hare to be like Pig Chef, a wandering outsider. Bard Hare has been there longer and maybe Bard Hare does not have a way off the island.

Is the Bard from the Forest Eye tribe, or does the Bard represent another humanoid species on The Island that knows of the Forest Eye culture, but observes it from outside of their community?

Bard Hare strikes me as similar to the Dennis Hopper character in Apocalypse Now: happy to be there for the art and explain it to the explorer, but not directly involved in the primary conflict.

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i’d primarily like to focus on level design or maybe combat design/gameplay encounters. That said it seems a lot of people in the level design thread are asking questions about what’s going to happen when, and really these questions also affect the type of gameplay encounters that will be had.

In an ideal world we’d match the story to a rough gameplay prototype, but we’ve already been given a story outline/characters so ¯_(ツ)_/¯ it feels this needs to be fleshed out some first in order to give the other disciplines some guidelines.

These are really a collection of ideas I’ve been putting together for my own benefit after reading a bunch of the threads. If I repeat something that’s already been said or ignore something or misunderstand something that’s been said elsewhere im sowwy.

Comments on current narrative ideas i’ve seen:

The biggest issue I have so far, Forest Eyes being referred to as an ‘indigenous culture’ We need to steer as far away from this becoming a, ‘foreigners are saviors’ thing or a ‘the natives are savage fools’ thing as we can. If they are in fact going to be an established culture on the island and not lawless troublemakers I would argue your primary combat ability should be completely ineffective on them. I saw notes in other places about combat rendering them ‘unconscious’ as opposed to killing them or destroying them, I would still say that is still too much. At most, offensive player abilities need to be treated like a small nuisance or inconvenience.
Here are some of my suggestions for this: The Gorons in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess don’t trust Link when he first approaches death mountain. They try to roll into him and knock him down. To get past this, Link must sumo-grab and toss them.

There was talk in the combat thread about possibly having a stealth mechanic,

A stealth system would be pretty big investment to implement, but if it were to be implemented this is where it might be highlighted. Instead of fighting the Forest Eyes you have to sneak past them somehow. Maybe they need to be distracted, moved from one path to open another.

Issue 2: Why the heck do we care about fixing the forest?
It is unclear how we get from “We want a tasty recipe” to “We want to save this forest” Pig shows up, “oh the island is in danger” maybe the pig is a good guy, maybe he wants to help, but if that’s the case then his goal should be helping people in disasters, not getting a recipe. What if he travels to many places to get many different recipes and this is just one of them? That would fit in line with this being a vertical slice gameplay segment and would open up some characterization about the pig. He wants to cook stuff, but he needs a recipe for it before he can make it. Guards don’t trust him? Gotta get some food they like. Need more health? Cook up some extra healthy food ala breath of the wild. What if the “imminent catastrophe” is just a feast without a main course?
To that end, why does the Bard Hare want to help you? He’s the bard, what’s a feast without a bard? Its his job to keep the party going, and he needs you to cook the main course. The King Eye may be the one pitching a fit about the feast not being ready but the Bard is the one making sure everything is in its place. I realize a cooking/crafting system is a bit of a tangent from “generic hacknslash” but it provides for interesting gameplay and it thematically fits so, idk.

Issue 3: Its unclear when you get the Torch Chick. I would argue it would work best if the Torch Chick is with you from the beginning. That said it would be in line with Zelda tradition for you to ‘discover’ the chick somewhere in the level, but it would also require us to figure out a backstory and world design for it that fit in with everything else when we could just, not do that. We also have people suggesting a torch tutorial early on, which would need to be altered if we picked it up later.
The concept art features a knife and a rod, which seem fitting for combat, but the torch chick could also be used as a fireball type attack. Also if there were to be a cooking element it would seem natural to feature the chick as the core of that system.

Again, my interest right now is figuring out what type of gameplay is going to occur so that work on gameplay systems/level design can start happening. I’ve got other questions about the camera rotation/targetting lockon/dash ability but those probably are best for a different thread.

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It could be the opposite of “foreigners are saviors”. With the way it’s been pitched, the foreigner might even be blamed for the whole imminent catastrophe, thus creating tension between Pig Chef and the Forest Eye.

That’s why when I summarized the story as far as I understood it, “advanced” was in quotations. At first, Pig Eye merely wants to use this culture for his own benefit of cooking an amazing recipe. The real story is him having to come to understand each culture he interacts with in order to get the recipe and/or ingredient from each map.

Pig Chef has to help the Forest Eye and their King with their goals, which end up furthering his own goal. Half-way through the game they turn from enemy to ally.

Some of the most interesting protagonists don’t take action for the right reasons, and over time they learn to value the “right” reasons.

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I’m mostly just pointing out something I’d like to be mindful of in regard to the Forest Eyes. It definitely makes sense for there to be some conflict between the two, but it also seems really easy to slip into something troublesome if we only allow the player to interact with the Forest Eyes via combat.

As for the player motivation thing. From a narrative standpoint, I understand the Pig doing something adjacent to his main goal, that seems like a pretty human thing to do. But the player is going to wonder whats going on.

We tell them,
“oh you want a recipe? this recipe is great!”
cool can I go get it?
“do this other thing real quick that might not be related”

the whole game is only going to be a small section of gameplay, i’d guess less than 1hr, the player motivation needs to be very straightforward. then again, maybe the real recipe was the friends we made along the way! or something

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This reminds me of islander Cargo Cults. If another pig previously brought rye bread to the island, the rye king may have gathered his people to create shrines just like the cargo cults did when people on airplanes provided them with material goods that they could not recreate on their own. The shrines cargo cults built did not create more goods as they thought, but they created them nonetheless in a sort of prayer that they would receive more goods. In that sense, the return of a pig chef could be seen by the forest eyes as some sort of messianic return. Their motivation would be to get the pig chef to restore inventory, and in return they will help the pig chef procure the special ingredients he is seeking. This would be the first act.

The second act: Will the Eye King allow the pig chef to return back home? Let’s say that the ingredients that the pig chef is procuring are to create a recipe with medicinal properties. He has to return home to save a family member using this recipe he found in an older recipe book (written by the previous pig chef). However, not knowing how to make rye bread himself, the Eye King intends on keeping the Pig Chef on the island to make bread forever so that his people may remain well fed. Eye King takes the ingredients that were promised to our hero in the first act as leverage to keep him on the island. Pig Chef gains the trust of some other Forest Eyes helping to teach them how to make the bread themselves so that they don’t have to rely on the Eye King to distribute the bread that feeds them (breaking the control of the king).

3rd act: Outraged that the king is losing control over others. He is beset on destroying the forest that contains this special ingredient that the Pig Chef is seeking as well as the homes of those he used to control. Pig Chef must then make choices on how to get these items that will be destroyed by a time-limit while also protecting the forest eyes that began to trust the Pig Chef. He has to work together with them so that their independence is maintained once he leaves back home knowing that this island will still hold these special ingredients for the next hero that needs them.

To address criticisms: the goal is not to make one group seem superior to another. It can instead show how certain ideals can either be productive or destructive. How thinking errors about how to produce wealth (bread) can move a society backwards towards starvation or forwards to bountiful production. The islanders can learn how to harness the special ingredients using the Pig Chef recipe in order to put themselves on a level playing field with their pig counterparts by exporting it to other sick pig children etc. Together through voluntary cooperation both societies become richer in the end. A happy ending.

The idea could also introduce some opportunities for well written jokes by illustrating some goofy ideas on how to fix problems.

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Based on some of the concept art and the characterization, I’d say the Phoenix Chick is with the Pig Chef from the start. It could’ve been gifted to him by someone important in his life, and has been with him on all his adventures to date. The player can wait until later on in the game to find out via some dialogue between the Pig Chef and the Bard Hare, or some other NPC, or it can be left unexplained, which would be fine for what I’m about to suggest.

I envision an intro to the Phoenix Chick tutorial to go something like this:

  • Once the camera pans to view the island as a whole, a bunch of flying creatures (bats, birds, a mixture, whatever) appear and fly out to sea, kinda like bats leaving a dark cave, since it is night after all.
  • The Pig Chef is startled, but the Phoenix Chick isn’t. In fact, Phoenix Chick may puff out its small little chest in a manner that says, “Follow me, I’ve got this.”
  • The Pig Chef, noticing the Phoenix Chick’s confidence, breathes a small sigh, whether of relief/anticipation/anxiety, then looks at the chick and says something to the effect of “Well, you’ve never led me astray before, let’s go exploring.”
  • The Phoenix Chick, although it probably doesn’t talk (i.e. its characterization is all physical due to its exaggerated mannerisms), gives a big smile and points a wing forward, as if to say “Let’s go this way!” and off they go.

Some variation of this interaction could be something the two go back and forth on with every new decision they make moving forward. If there ever becomes a point where the player is lost or doesn’t know what to do, the chick could dis/agree with a movement or decision by getting angry or pulling the other way. Could even use the chick as the reason the chef decides to help the locals, as the chick could jump out of the lantern and nudge the chef to do something. The main reason for something like this would be for the player to feel the value of the Phoenix Chick and not think it’s simply a light or a flamethrower, although both of those things are obviously in play as well. :wink:

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I agree that using Google spreadsheets will be more suitable for this kind of project, since it eases the collaborative part and data can easily be exported to a format we can load in-game.
Also, this can help build a translation table that allows anyone to easily translate the game to their desired language

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having the chick be able to walk around near the player during gameplay would be interesting. Similar to Elizabeth from bioshock? Could be used to signpost the intended path, make note of interactive items. Might be too much ai work tho, just a thought.

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on the spreadsheets vs docs debate. I really see them as different tools for different purposes. For writing dialog that’s going to go directly into the game, spreadsheets make sense. definitely useful for translations. For writing an outline or draft of the script through, docs feels more accessible as its an actual word processor

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If Elizabeth is the inspiration, then this game will have to have either a prequel/sequel where the chick is the star! Totally up for it, but one step at a time.

And yes, it’d be a fair amount of AI, but I’d argue Unity has a lot of good tools in that department and this could be a good way to showcase them.

On a slight tangent, this project so far scares me to see how easily things can get more complex than the original vision intended, and quickly! Glad it’s not me trying to reign it all in.

… although I wouldn’t be against it if given the opportunity, heh.

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