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Week 4 - Dialogue System Protoype

A Child's Tale
A downloadable game for Windows and Linux

Hi! This week I focused on building a dialogue system prototype that showcased how the game's narrative and dialogue would be presented. 

  • For the dialogue with NPCs I built a simple textbox-based system with choices and branching.
  • For the narration I built an audio-based system with subtitles and conversations between the narration and the child.

There wouldn't be as many interventions from the narrator in the normal gameplay but the video gives some ideas of what kinds of things the narrator and child comment on.

I used INK and a unity INK module to write out the script and imported it to unity. I have a unity script that uses the INK module to read that INK script and extract the narrative lines one by one. I used https://15.ai/ to generate the audio files.

Because I have the audio files separated line by line, the text is actually "called" by the audio file, so there is no need to time it right. When the audio file finishes, if there are more lines of script, it calls the next audio file, which then calls the next text line.

Hope you like it :)

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