Narrative Designers create more than Dialog Flows in Tavern Talk

This time we would like to highlight how our narrative designers are able to do more than just write and connect dialog nodes. 

As for a narrative game like Tavern Talk with potentially major shifts in the narrative during development, we established a way to allow in-game adjustments using the same tool we use to write the dialogs. So now our designers are able to reveal more information for your journal, change the ambient music, or just let you switch to the drink mixing environment.

Once we export our dialog flow into Unity dialog nodes, these "Hubs" are initially recognized in the same abstract format. Taking this and checking which type of node the dialog flow is actually stopping on allows us to trigger all these effects dynamically in our implementation.

 This even allows us to let the narrative team define additional variables that we can handle in the called code bits. Like e.g. the "Reveal Character Name Hub" allows one or more character's names to be revealed so you are able to see their name on the following dialog bubbles instead of "???".

And while we still, of course, need to implement these behaviors and create a blueprint hub to define the variables we want to receive. This allows us to easily adjust the game depending on our narrative needs instead of hard coding everything to happen after X dialog bubbles or something like that. 

Examples:

• The next character arrives in the evening? Sure, let's trigger a black fade with a switch to the night background. 
• The character tells you a rumor about a werewolf in the south? Sure, let's add it to your journal. 
• Something ominous is about to happen? Sure, let's trigger a switch in our ambient music. 

So basically you can think of these as stage directions to make more things happen than just text flying across the screen. All to breathe life into our story and world (or better into our tavern).