Dialog Only VN Thoughts/Tips?

[dstarsboy]

I'm working on a new game idea (which I'll post in the WIP thread soon) that is all dialog based. Meaning you will never read "She smiles at me softly." or "As I walk into the corridor, I am dwarfed by its grandness." or "I decide that I have to apologize to Mindy so I pack my things and head to her coffee shop." stuff in the text box. Never mentioning how you feel at any moment or any description of your surroundings or anything like that. Every thing that shows up in the text box is someone speaking to you.

Also, every time the main character speaks, it will be a series of dialog choices. This is very much like any BioWare RPG.

Has anyone tried this (either playing a VN or in creating your own) and what are your opinions? Can anyone offer any tips or suggestions to avoid pitfalls in this type of game? One thing I can think of is that you almost permanently need a side kick character of some sort hanging around to "talk to" whenever you want to convey something to the player or send the player to a different location.

I'd love any links to VNs that do this for guidance as well.

Thanks in advance for all of the help!

[curry nochi rice]

My protagonist is a male guy who likes to sleep and will always close his eyes when walking, running or turning his head...

I'm having double thoughts since the players might not like the idea.... I mean, i already have at least 5 scenes where the player closes his eyes and sees only dialogue...

[Chansel]

The idea of having options every time the main character speaks is something I personally love =D
So you should defiantly go for that!

However, not reading anything but dialog seems rather.. difficult. I mean, just setting the mood with dialog and pictures just seem like an impossible task.
So you'd either have to have some kick-ass pictures or some very (and I mean VERY) good dialog.
You might want to re-consider, if you ask me. But in the end, I don't know how you draw or how you write. So who knows? Maybe you'll be able to pull it off. But trust me, it'll be difficult.
The thing is, YOU might have all sorts of vivid images in your head of what the characters are doing while you are writing it, but we (the readers) don't. Unless you somehow show us (either trough art or writing).
Or maybe you have some other way to do this which I haven't thought of ^^" ?

As for the 'sidekick' I might have a suggestion. Perhaps you could implant some sort of diary system? Or every time you want to give the player a new rule, force the character to read a book or something?
Or just use a pop-up to convey whatever it is you want to convey

Besides the Bioware games, I don't know of any VN's where you get to choose everything the character says. Alas.. It would be so totally awesome!

Xx

[papillon]

There was a thread on it once, but turning it up to reference would be tricky.

IIRC what I said then was that the idea is doable but requires much more art and more skill in artistic direction than a traditional VN... you'd be moving more in the direction of a comic book. If you want ideas, read lots of comics and look at how they express emotional nuances through postures, reaction shots, and duplicated panels. Or movies (that don't have narrators) - study how they communicate things like "suddenly feeling guilty"

Similarly, you might need to have the protagonist on-screen rather than hidden in first person view, because if they can't describe what they're thinking/feeling/doing, we're going to have to see it.

The whole idea of the narration mechanic is to make life EASIER for you the game developer. If you drop it, you're giving yourself a very difficult task. The end result could be awesome but only if you're very good at art and willing to make tons of it.

[Aleema]

I think the reason Bioware's dialogue trees work is because there was a gameplay mechanic that separated the conversations (running around the 3D world). If you had a stat-raising framework, where you had to physically go up and talk to someone to require narration, then it could work. Otherwise, it would be annoying. =P

[dstarsboy]

@curry That's essentially the same thing that I had in mind, although I assume in your case when the person's eyes are closed, the screen is black except for the dialog box? That's weird that you wouldn't narrate his thoughts during that case though.

@Chansel The diary system is a great idea. In BioWare games like Dragon Age and Mass Effect, there is an insane library of Codexes and stuff that explains the intricacies of how things work in the world.

@Pap I have a terrible time with narration conveying what I think the person should be feeling at a particular point in the story. I'm usually off by quite a bit, and I've been told as much. I guess I don't relate to typical romance that well. You're right though, this will be very much like a comic book although I was actually planning on having the MC on the screen only when you click on the dialog option, I'll explain why below.

@Aleema I get your point, if the bioware games narrated every movement or action, it would be terribly annoying. Probably why they did it the way that they did, more out of necessity than trying to be ground-breaking.

My plan... which sounds like I may fail at... is actually for me not to dictate what the reader should be feeling like at each moment. If I show him a beautiful background of a garden, I want him to simply think it's beautiful (or not) rather than write "I step out of the doorway and am in awe of the beauty surrounding me."

A better example would be, if a female lead insults him, "Never! I would never date a man like you!" I don't want to tell the reader "At this, I take a few steps back, reeling from the dagger to my heart."

What if the reader doesn't care about this girl? What if his idea of romance is different from how I think he should feel at this point? Here is where, instead, he'll have dialog options:

"But... but... I have loved you from the moment I saw you."
"That's cool, I bagged your best friend last night anyways."
"Uh... I was asking you to study not to dinner."

This way, the reader can convey how they feel in every dialog and take the story where they want to.

I think I may actually try this, although the only reason I think it may work in my game is because it's story is fairly linear, it seems like this would be ridiculous to do in a heavily branching game.

[Chansel]

Hmm... Well, it could work.
But what if you want the main character to lie? Or to use sarcasm?
Perhaps it's an option to just simply pu [lie] in front of the line in such cases.
Some of the dialogs in Jade Empire (from bioware =D) use this, and it works pretty well.

Or simply not let the main character lie XD

Xx

[Wintermoon]

I think using just dialogue (i.e. no narration) could work, but it would require a lot of artwork. You would have to take the "show, not tell" rule literally and show everything that's happening on the screen.

Making all dialogue into choices would be a lot more difficult to pull off, because you could easily end up with an exponential explosion of paths. I wouldn't attempt it for anything longer than five minutes of play time.

[ludeshka]

I would seriously LOVE a game where I'm given different options every time I get to speak (Baldurs Gate 2/Fallout/Neverwinter Nights are games I really enjoyed, so yeah...)

Actually, I'd be ten thousand times more interested in the sidekick character than in a diary/codex system. (If it ever comes a moment where no more new information/rules are introduced, you could always make the sidekick a "romanceable" character if it's a romantic VN, or have him/her turn traitor and surprise the hell out of the player if it's not. Or both! XD)

[iAsobu]

I'm doing this "dialogue only" style for the VN I'm working on. Though it's not that so much as it is "narration minimal". I'd like to have my VN pictured as basically a video game without the fancy gameplay. Like TWEWY, but without the Noise battles, item collection, and walking around.

[Fireserpent]

The current game I'm working on has almost no player speak what so ever without the player choosing what to say. It's meant to give the feeling that you are the one experiencing it. It makes the dialogues a lot more involved to write, especially if you make a more dynamic/nonlinear game that I'm doing.

But I leanred some tricks to give the illusion of choice in dialogues that actually intended to be linear.. If anyone's interested, I can show a couple of example of what I've been working on.

[dstarsboy]

The current game I'm working on has almost no player speak what so ever without the player choosing what to say. It's meant to give the feeling that you are the one experiencing it. It makes the dialogues a lot more involved to write, especially if you make a more dynamic/nonlinear game that I'm doing.

But I leanred some tricks to give the illusion of choice in dialogues that actually intended to be linear.. If anyone's interested, I can show a couple of example of what I've been working on.

I'd love to see some of your script or any tips. Please PM me.

[Aleema]

But I leanred some tricks to give the illusion of choice in dialogues that actually intended to be linear.. If anyone's interested, I can show a couple of example of what I've been working on.

I think that's the whole trick of the multiple-decision dialogue tree to begin with. The first time you play the game, the choices seem endless! The next time you play, you realize that nothing you ever said changed anything most of the time ... and yet, you don't care.

[dstarsboy]

True, this would really only work for linear stories that are good for a single play through.

[DonSketch]

Personally I think you're a genius,when I'm done with my project I will probably do something similar(because I love the idea).I don't think you would need to go "all out" with the art I mean...that's what the choices are there for right?If something happens you decide how you feel about it by choosing a menu option (like your example above),I think it's awesome.I'm looking forward to it.