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.
Tag Tea-Powered Games
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.
Firstly, a bit of news: We’ve re-launched Dialogue on Steam Greenlight. We’ve had a positive response to the game from many people, but we thought we could do a better job of giving this unique take on conversations its best chance. After pulling together feedback from a variety of sources, we’re happy to present a new version of Dialogue, with a complete visual overhaul of the user interface.
In response to our Accessibility post, we received a comment about the lack of failure in Dialogue, and how that affected the game. This is something we thought about while designing Dialogue, and it seemed important enough to share these thoughts. The comment is found in the Accessibility post, but here is the part we’re responding to.
One of our goals as Tea-Powered Games has always been to make our games accessible to as many people as possible. There are many different things to consider, but we tried to ask ourselves at every junction what we could do to make our game easier to play. We’d like to share some of the decisions we think helped Dialogue’s accessibility, and (because we can always do better) some which we wished we could have made work.
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!
Last week we spoke a bit about the process of writing and designing a scene of Dialogue. This week our developer, Antony, is here to detail how that scene then makes it into the game.
Hi! Antony here, developer for these here folks. Last week’s post told us about building the script which serves as the backbone for the entire game of Dialogue. This week I wanted to elaborate on the process of taking that and converting it into a game-usable format. Luckily, thanks to the amazing efforts of the rest of the team, this is mostly straightforward!
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 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!