Question about Making Dialogue Cost Something
Hello Fellow Creators of Adventure!
I've come here before asking about a simple question that, in hindsight, was almost silly, and the help I got was fantastic! So I've returned to see what you all may think of as a solution to my new problem.
It starts with a little example to show you what I mean. You know how, in Call of Duty or Battlefield or...almost any game with a gun, or at least the primary interaction with said game is a gun, that gun typically has bullets? The player starts off with a set amount and expends them to interact with the game world. When they run out of bullets, they pick up more bullets from the people who they "spent" their ammunition on. Similarly, games like Diablo or WoW have a "mana" meter, Dark Souls games have a "Stamina" meter that replenishes when when the player either drinks potions or rests for a short time to recharge their interaction method with the game.
What I want to do is exactly one of those myriad constructs, but with dialogue. The player character has X amount of "Dialogue Bullets" or a finite pool of "Dialogue Mana" which they can draw from through the game, and when it is depleted, a fail-state is introduced. Perhaps, even, the dialogue pool is the health pool, which even more greatly ramps the stakes. See, the issue that I have with dialogue heavy games is that dialogue is typically "free." In that a player expends none of their own resources to use it. Or it falls into a contrivance of "select X option for abstract Y result." To me, very often, dialogue tends to be a "non-game" thing in the capital G Game. A necessary evil to make a game "have a story" rather than the "story" being "the game." Most, if not all, other interaction methods in games have a resource pool which the player makes a conscious decision to draw from to interact...so why not dialogue?
Now, I am by no means a programmer. I can make things work in AC using models I haven't made and animations I didn't make. I've even copied code off the internet and pasted it into a Visual Studio script and Voila! The object turns. I've made branching dialogue trees in 3rd person 3d and first person AC games. But that's about the extent of my knowledge. So I was wondering, after a couple hours of starting at the action-list editor options, what do you all think might be the best solution to make Dialogue "cost" something. I'm sure it's super simple, like "pop a variable in there and make it count down" or something. But, being that I come from a Writing background and not a programming one, the options tend to glob together into an intimidating mass.
Anyway, thanks for your help if you can provide it!
Best,
Dylan
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Comments
Hi!
I think you gave the best answer to your own question. There's no simpler way to do this other than having an int variable that you subtract from/add to during gameplay. You can check the variable before each dialogue and branch it depending on the result you get.
Re: game design, interesting mechanic. Those mechanics wouldn't work in the game I'm making, but I kind of share some of your frustrations with dialogue. In a way, though, I've been trying to make dialogue LESS of a game -- erasing the distinction between winning, which usually means unblocking more content, or losing, which usually means missing out on content.
@Rairun Thanks! It's funny because I genuinely just typed out words I've seen in the action list editor which seemed to apply, so that I was right is miraculous and hilarious. I'll start messing around with it to see how it would work. I'll also need to display the current "dialog bullets" somewhere in the UI, which is something I've yet to do, as well, but such is life for an inexperienced developer.
And as per your second paragraph, yeah I definitely don't think it would work for all games, even most. I suppose my goal is just to experiment with dialogue to see if there's a way to "make it a game," as it were. But a "game" is loaded and vague simultaneously. A book is technically a game, too, when it's written well. Everything is on that Narratology/Ludology spectrum in some form or another!
Variables can be displayed in Label menu elements through use of tokens. For example, the token [var:2] will be replaced - at runtime - with the value of Global Variable 2.
A tutorial on this technique can be found here, but the Manual's "Text tokens" chapter lists all token types available for use.
@ChrisIceBox Thanks Chris. With both of your help, I got it working. Now I just have to iterate on this dialogue meter a lot more and think up a reasonable fail state for when the meter reaches either 0 (the player-character has given up) or its maximum value (the player-character has lost control.)
But anyway, thanks for the excellent help, as always!