BTS#11 - Creating a Chat (3/4)

Alrighty then, let's see where we left off. It is recommended to have read the previous entry before reading on. So far, we have discussed planning a chat scenario and then we created the art assets for it. And with that, we're finally at the writing phase.

I was initially planning to explain how I write and how I make characters feel alive, how I give them personalities and such. Buuut... I think it would be rather boring to read a "how to" on writing styles.

So instead, I will give a closer look into the backend of the chats and how they look in engine, as I think that will be a much more interesting read. But before that, let's actually do cover some writing content.

From the design phase, we have an outline of what the chat is supposed to look like, and we now have to flesh it out. We need to pay attention to which girl it is we are writing for and making sure that the style of speech and content of what is being said matches their personality. As said before, only the direction and general content are planned out, not the very specifics which come during this process. For this reason, and others, I write the chat directly in the chat backend, which looks like this:

Essentially what you see here is a single line of dialog with absolutely nothing going on. Essentially, this is one text message which would plop into the chat. Give it a voice clip reference and it's ready to go and be used in game!

There are obviously plenty of other things you can do (this backend is custom coded). If we assign a portrait, the entry automatically converts to a picture message, adding that picture to the girl's gallery and unlocking it once you see this message. We can add special effects, like play audio or have this entry give the girl some information that we can use in the future. And since this is one Dialog block, it would usually consist of many, many entries. Think of this block like a chain of messages the girl can say.

One chat consists of many of these Dialog blocks. Some are the main chain for the chat, since everyone needs a line going from start to finish. These are what move the chat along. Others are responses to chat options you chose. And they all get put together into the "container" of the whole chat.

This is what that looks like. Here we can see the "Girl Messages", a dialog block from the main chain, and the choices the player gets to make after this main chain block. These then have a dialog block as their response which either loops back to the main chain and goes to the next entry in this big container or branches off with its own chat choices into even deeper dialog blocks (which you can see is settable in the first picture).

Now, that is the absolute basic part of it, there is much more going on in the background. Mainly the "Requirements" and "Visibility Requirements" fields are of note. Requirements are conditions that must be met for the Response to trigger. If a single condition is not met, the alternate response is instead chosen and triggered. So, for example, if you say "why don't you send me a nude right now?" and the requirement for this message is that the girl likes you a lot, if you don't meet this requirement the alternate response might be something like "Piss off!", maybe even lowering her attraction toward you even further. Likewise, if the girl DOES like you, she might in fact send you a nude or tease you, maybe her affection will even increase if she likes the question / situation.

And finally, there is the "Visibility Requirements", which are essentially the same thing, but completely hide this chat choice if they are not met. An easy example would be the cat Maru: the player has many opportunities to talk about this cat during chats with Aurelia, but it is absolutely possible she never befriended the cat in the first place, so this particular chat option would not be visible if she didn't.

As you might guess: there are many, many choices that lead to very different responses depending on the choices you made by this point, and yet again many more that you can't even see while playing the game. But hey, doesn't that mean I'm writing a bunch of text that the players won't even see in the first place? Well... yeah. I mentioned this in a voting post before: think of the chat scenarios you play as roughly being ~60% of the chat scenario how it is in the backend. The goal was to make the game branch off and have meaningful choices, this is the result of it.

Astute eyes also saw the "Walkthrough Message" field, which I made part of the backend in case we ever want to have a walkthrough for the game. I would hate a plane PDF-file that just lists the choices and think IF we ever do a walkthrough, it would be much more pleasant if the choices themselves said "This leads to Lydia's "Wet Actress" scene". But that is future talk.

Alright, I'll leave it here. I hope this backend view into at least some parts of what chats look like in the engine was more interesting than reading about me ramble things like "and this is why having the "..." is so important".

Next time we'll hit the final part: creating the audio and... everything else. The everything else part being the many, many tiny things that still need creating before a chat is fully complete.