For the last three days, we’ve been game jamming. It was our first time, and it was a great experience! We were fortunate enough to be teaming up with Victor Ojuel for writing, the theme was ‘A Small World’, and the three of us are pretty proud of our game: Nightwards, Heartwards.
Destina
Posts by Destina
Here at Tea-Powered Games we talk about dialogue quite often, but what is it that good dialogue could add to your game?
In the case where you use dialogue to add new kinds of play to your game, it gives players a change of pace, a new mechanic to play with, or different kinds of goals. If you tie dialogue to your game’s current mechanics, fans of those mechanics will get to interact with them more, and experience more interesting variations. More importantly, entirely new stories and games become possible when you start thinking about conversation as a part of the game rather than just more words on screen.
It sounds great, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, figuring out what kind of dialogue your game needs is not very straightforward.
Hey there. We’ve built up a backlog of questions in response to some of our previous blogs about Dialogue, so we thought it was about time we answer them.
A big thanks goes out to Dylan Connor for these questions.
After this post, we’ll be taking a bit of a break from weekly posts to accommodate an ever-busier schedule. We hope you’ve enjoyed these early looks at Dialogue. We’ll be back with more announcements about this and future work as soon as we can.
For now, enjoy!
In this week’s post we want to talk a bit about the process of making our game, focusing on an individual scene. Hopefully this will give you a bit of insight into the kind of process that lead to Dialogue being the game it is.
We have to start somewhere, so we’ll go from the scene outline. This is just a few sentences on what the scene itself is about and which characters are in it. It’s already been placed within the story as a whole, so you can see the conversations that happen before and after it, as well as its own relevance to the plot as a whole.
Dialogue is about conversations, and conversations need characters. Today we introduce you to Adrian: next door neighbour of the main character and a biochemistry researcher by trade. We have a soft spot for science at TPG, so it’s no wonder one of the more heavily featured characters tries to deliver an everyday-lens on research to the story. Have a gander at a few of his in-game expressions, along with sound bites (voiced by the talented and enthusiastic Monty d’Inverno).
Last week we teased some character art and story, this week we have a few backdrop snippets for you. The overall setting for Dialogue is modern, everyday life, so I can imagine it being a difficult task to make it suitably ordinary, in its own stylish extraordinary way. I say ‘imagine’ because Zoë, our resident artist for Dialogue, was definitely up to the task. But why don’t I let this preview of her work speak for itself.
Lucille’s living room
Dialogue is a game about conversation so, unsurprisingly, a lot of talking happens. We at TPG have played more than our share of text heavy games, but we knew from the start that it would be difficult to capture the feeling of conversation without voice acting.
From a design perspective, voice acting is an important tool. With voice acting, your ears can take on some of the work too, so your eyes and reading capacity aren’t overloaded. Having the vast majority of the game voiced is also a major step towards creating a more accessible game – whether that means a more comfortable experience for casual players or a more play-able one for players with visual impairments. Also, it’s really cool!
Hello all, welcome to the home of Tea-Powered Games! We are an indie game development company focused on telling stories and pioneering mechanics which broaden storytelling in games. We also drink excessive amounts of tea, if such a thing as ‘excess tea’ exists (it doesn’t, by the way). This is the place to read our thoughts, get updates on our work and get in touch with us.
I am Dustin Connor, and along with the lovely Florencia Minuzzi, we are the Co-Directors and Founders of TPG. I’d like to kick things off by letting you take a peek at what we care about and why we’re here working hard to bring you great new interactive experiences.
Tea-Powered Games is a playful, independent game development company aimed at creating progressive, narrative games. By showcasing new ways of integrating storytelling and play, we want to present fresh perspectives and experiences to enrich the lives of our players. We aim to tell stories and provide meaningful play regardless of how experienced someone might be with games. Platform, target audience, genre and style are all chosen on a project-by-project basis to fit the experience, always with an eye towards the experimental and exploratory.
Follow us @TeaPoweredTeam
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