Seasoned writer-designer of So Blonde rubbishes ‘distracting’ game writing technique
In an exclusive article written for Develop, So Blonde writer-designer Steve Ince has discounted dialogue trees as a system for delivering conversations in interactive gaming as “very clumsy and a huge waste of time.”
“One of the problems with a tree structure is that there is often the need to copy whole sections of dialogue into new places in the tree in order to get them to trigger in the right way,” he said.
“If dialogue needs to be copied and pasted anywhere, then it is likely to be a problem with the scene structure or the system that drives the dialogue.”
Ince went on to detail his personally preferred method of working with in-game dialogue as to use Boolean Variables, a simple variable in conversations that has only two values: true or false. Conversation then returns to a central point from which an unchanging group of questions can be asked.
“Because Boolean variables can only be True or False, it may seem that there is a danger of losing the spectrum of subtlety,” Ince said.
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“They are not there to define the subtlety, or lack of such, but control the structure within which the team creates the subtlety. The real subtlety will come from the writer knowing the characters well.”
The full article can be read here.
Boolean Variables are the secret to conversational structure?!? Sorry, I can't even think that without LMFAO.
Who on earth copies and pastes conversation structure? Sounds like "here's a guy who hasn't got a clue about dialogue processing with integrated logic handling. If he knew how they worked, he wouldn't have even dared to say something as stupid as "copied and pasted".
He's not a shining example of what 17 years teaches you in the games industry.
"One particular beauty in this structural approach is that the development team can see the shape that’s forming much earlier because they don’t have to wait for the dialogue"
You don't have to wait for the dialogue in a dialogue tree either... if you know what you are doing.
This guy is the classic "it's my way or the highway". Which is usually employed by someone who doesn't understand, that highways can be more efficient than the private roads they choose to drive down. It seems to be his own misconceived perception of dialogue trees that is leading him to the wrong conclusion.
Steve's understanding of dialogue trees = FALSE
