Breakdown

Overview

My main focus with this project was the creation of dialogue, building an interactive narrative and compelling unique characters.

As a base for the project I used 2D art assets and a dialogue editor from the Unity Store. I also got music, footsteps and other sounds off the store.

I supplemented this with my own art particularly for characters. The dialogue editor also didn't work the way I wanted. In order to have conversations be remembered when speaking with other characters to allow story progression I had to make lots of changes. With these changes and my own script for movement I had a basic prototype and was ready to start building the story.

Story

Basic premise

My idea was that you are a dog detective who must speak with various animal NPCs to uncover the truth of what happened on the farm. To achieve this I would need compelling characters with interesting relationships. So I started with simple descriptions.

Characters

• Detective Doberman - player

• Mrs Gallus - murder victim

• Cashimere - culprit, hiding their affair

• Mr Comb - mafia boss, husband of Mrs Gallus

• Ms Eggalina - oldest wife of Mr Comb

• Ova - shy sheep, last one to see Mrs Gallus

• Hircus - dating Ova, having an affair with Cashimere

• Lopez - fox, notices things

• Mama Porky - hears the gossip

Ms Eggalina

Lopez

Hircus

Cashimere

Ova

Doberman Idle

Mr Comb

Doberman Running

These are the final characters I created. I don't think the website can handle low resolution pixel art very well so they may look a little odd.

I was quite a fun exercise to communicate the characters appearance and traits with such limited pixels and colours to work with. I also use black and white pixels to ensure they could work on dark or light background much like the art pack I got from the Unity Store.

Dialogue

Now with characters I had to give them their dialogue and allow the player to progress through the story.

By creating a map of the important dialogue points and how they would trigger future dialogue I was able to visualize the story and what dialogue options and text I would need.

After this I had to actually implement this and write the specific text characters would say which would need to match their personalities. I had a lot of fun with the writing part, but the dialogue editor I was using ended up being a bit unwieldy and tedious. It also lacked certain controls that made things feel a little off such as the order that dialogue options appear being determined by when you connect the nodes and not by an assigned number. As I needed to keep track of dialogue triggers separately it also got quite confusing trying to visualise in editor and I needed to rework my changes I had made as they actually weren't robust enough at remembering triggers. These changes did make it a little less tedious but it was still not ideal.

This is an example portion of dialogue for just one character. I had to keep track of all the inter-character connections in my head or through my flow chart.

Retrospective

The dialogue system was a big limitation of the project and killed my motivation to untangle the mess and polish everything up. I ended up cutting a bunch of dialogue and the alternate ending as it became too difficult to manage. As it is the game can be finished but requires very specific traversal of the dialogue trees by asking just the right questions with a lot of walking back and forth. The lack of alternate routes makes it very hard to actually get to the end.

If I was to continue work on this project I would want to explore alternate dialogue editor tools and port over everything so I can clean it up and add more smoothly. Writing character dialogue and making their designs was certainly the most enjoyable part and I would love to do more of that in the future.