[Geraldo] Going more into tech related to the dialogue pipeline, we already saw in the (Project Eternity) session some stuff, diagrams and all those annotations, so the question is just, I'm assuming you guys have a toolset to bring that into Unity, do you actually handle the editor or do you just write and then someone just…?
[Chris] No, all the writers they actually write in the editor. The way it works is, even though we couldn't use the Onyx engine, which is our internal engine, we were able to take the dialogue editor out of Onyx and apply that to the Unity set so all the writing styles that we're used to with Onyx we're actually able to do in Unity now, so having access to that dialogue editor, it's really easy to write in, it's probably the easiest editor to write in of any of the editors that I've worked on which is fantastic. So yeah, we're all responsible for implementing our own writing.
On Wasteland 2 is a little bit different, the designers write the script but the implementers are different, it just depends on the company.
[Geraldo] That's pretty cool that you get to implement the dialogue directly.
[Chris] Yeah, and then you can fix all the issues with it and run through it a few times until it feels right for you. Cause sometimes when you pass it off for someone else to implement, they don't know all the nuances of what you're shooting for, I just think the more familiar that you get with the toolset that implements the content, the better your work's gonna be.
[Geraldo] Yeah, because there's this fear where someone does an asset and then someone else is going to implement it, but with this case it's not like that. [Chris] Yeah I think whenever you have a system like that there's a danger that there can be some miscommunication, completely unintentionally, that ends up with a totally different result. If you don't have time to go back and play through and understand what you did when you implemented it it's a little bit harder to fix.
[Geraldo] Is there any facet of your game writing, you already told you have a pretty good dialogue editor, but imagine you had an infinite amount of engineers to work on new tool, can you think of something that would help your job tremendously?
[Chris] Well one thing that I think could be really interesting is, I don't know if we'd use it for an Eternity style game, but the ability to dictate dialogue nodes and then have those be filled out as you're writing could be kind of interesting, especially with voice acted games, you have to say the line out loud anyway when you're writing, it's important.
Also, this sounds strange, but having a dialogue editor that you can take portably anywhere, cause right now you have to be linked into the network and be able to access the toolsets from there, I would prefer the ability to have a small thing to just have in the laptop, type up a dialog conversation and then easily import that back into the main game. There's some editors in the past that have allowed for that, but the ability to do that would be kind of nice.
I don't know I guess I'd have to give it more thought, I don't think anyone has ever given me that offer before. *laughs*
[Geraldo] You touched on this as well (storytelling session), talking about procedurally generated content producing meaningful stories, and decisions taken by the AI, for example a faction taking control of an empty kingdom, while the engine generates random dungeons and NPCs and stuff like that, can you imagine a way to imbue those randomly generated things and AI maneuvers with meaningful story and add something to it?
[Chris] Yeah, it was what we tried to do in a very simplistic way with the Modron Cube in Planescape. We had certain set pieces like the boss battle's location, but we're able to give an overall premise for why this location exists, why it's meaningful and derive meaningful story rewards out of a system like that, even if the context of the dungeon is a randomly generated dungeon. And I think a number of campaign settings have created dungeons like that, like Castle Greyhawk in the old Greyhawk campaign setting. It was a completely insane castle but there was a reason for why it had all this insanity shifting around, and then Halaster's Undermountain Dungeon, in the Forgotten Realms, is also a series of random dungeons you can create like that and it makes perfect sense for why that dungeon exists, what the premise is.
And then when we did Old World Blues, for Fallout New Vegas, the premise was completely insane, but there was a reason for all that insanity that allowed people to build just about anything they wanted to and play around with the props and the tilesets, just because the narrative design dictated "here's why this crazy location exists", and it makes a certain kind of sense and mostly just allows you a lot of freedom to do stuff.
[Geraldo] But I think that's more from the perspective of having the opportunity, from the outset, to tell "ok, this is the reason this is like this" but I was thinking of just having a system that would give descriptions to something out of randomness, having the writers input something, do you think that is possible, do you think that you would lose authorship?
[Chris] I think that would allow for some interesting stories to be told I do know if we did have a randomly generated system like that, which we're not planning for Eternity, we'd have to have some set of bookends for that random generation in terms of what creatures would respawn at what location and have a range of that stuff as opposed to just completely freeform spawning. But I think there's a way to set that up with a lot of freedom but at some point there would need to be bookends.
[Geraldo] Do you think we should be moving to newer technologies that help us create stories, that emerge from these systems that we've mentioned, instead of mapping out the whole tree, do you think the technology for dialogue writing is still the same or are we advancing?
[Chris] I think the dialogue editor always limits the dialogues that you have. I feel that when you write a game in the Neverwinter editor for example, that's much different than writing a dialogue in the GECK and then much different dialogue than we wrote for New Vegas, ultimately the dialogue editor makes some types of conversations more possible, while other dialogue editors make a certain flow of a conversation harder to do.
I think we should always be looking at new technologies to implement conversations, and especially how that is displayed on the screen, cause while the menu options for dialogues which is, you know, very Infinity Engine, very Fallout, that serves a purpose and there are some positives to it, overall I think that there's more room for experimentation for things that you can do with dialogue editors, we should always be looking for stuff like that.
[Geraldo] So thinking of Alpha Protocol as one step, do you think of what could be the other step?
[Chris] The step would not be removed from the game. So the reason the Alpha Protocol system was the way it was was because we wanted that urgency, we wanted that drama, we wanted you to feel like spy, we wanted you to feel like you had to think on your feet, while you were talking to everybody in a conversation and that's because it was an espionage RPG, that was the driving force for that system.
The idea with the dialogue advance would be, we would want to explore dialogue tools that enforce the theme and ambience of the game that they're being used for, that would be a big part for it.
In terms of developing independently in a vacuum, I don't know if I'd have a good answer for that, (with all the cons of) whatever game that we're trying to make.
