In this chapter Freeman introduces the concept of ‘depth’. Depth is a recurring theme throughout Creating Emotion in Games. Decrying the lack of depth in games writing is Freeman’s underlying motivation behind the whole Emotioneering show. My biggest general criticism of the book is the lack of attention Freeman gives to defining the almost esoteric terms he bandies around so freely and his failure to properly define what he means by ‘depth’ is the biggest sin.
One of the things Freeman bemoans in his criticism of the majority of videogame writing is “robo-speak”, which he defines as flat, characterless but most importantly emotionless dialogue. In an effort to see the difference the application of his NPC Interesting Techniques make, let’s rough out some robo-speak in our script.
NPC Interesting Techniques. I’ve said it before, but Freeman really doesn’t do his credibility any favours using terms like this. He means ‘Ways to Make NPCs Interesting’.
We’ve covered a lot of this chapter already but it’s worth a quick recap. Freeman introduces his ‘Character Diamond’, a list of around four (hence diamond) Traits that serve as an outline and a thumbnail sketch for major NPCs. You create a list for each character and then measure the dialogue you write up against that list to see if you’re keeping the personality of that character clear and coherent.
The other kind of conversation we want to be able to implement is ‘player-instigated’ conversation. If the character is set up correctly when the player puts her reticle over an NPC character it becomes bracketed, indicating the NPC can be interacted with. We want the player to be able to choose to talk to our characters as and when she feels like it.
We’re rapidly approaching a turning point. Up until now this has mostly been a learning exercise, making up technical techniques as we go along. Very soon we’ll have all the tools at our disposal to complete the idea, when that happens it’s all legwork and very little experimentation with the engine.
The hardest part about this project is keeping my mind compartmentalised enough to be able to deal with the disparate elements, modelling, skinning, unrealscripting, AI scripting, dialogue scripting etc whilst trying to keep a few brain cells left over to see how the story is going to play out as a whole. Trying to think about everything at the same time is too much for my limited mental resources so I’m going to have take a few steps to try and break it down into easier to digest chunks.
After completing the rough versions of the timeline events it’s time to put them into place and play through the game. This is an important step, because even though we’re nowhere near finished we need to start getting some feedback as early as possible to avoiding continuing down paths that aren’t really going to lead us anywhere. In the Managing a Mod Project presentation I made a point of emphasising that you should ‘Assess, Evaluate, Be Ruthless’ for just this reason.
We’ve nearly finished (finally) with the timeline events. The two remaining occurrances are going to be very similar to the snipers we did last time: set up some location markers and then script the Ghost Warrior bots to take up position.
The problem with writing articles like these is that they are always written with perfect hindsight. As you might have guessed the actual progress on this project is some weeks in front the things you read about here and I’ve had plenty of time to work out the problems, throw out the experiments that don’t work and organise a sequence of events that is logical and (hopefully) makes sense.
Let’s take a break from property sheets, script files and custom packages for a moment. The last three events that will be triggered by the timeline are attacks from the enemy, the Ghost Warrior mercenaries of the Izanagi Corporation. We could just drop the pawns into the map and start on the scripts to send them rushing towards the bunker. To me, that’s pretty much exactly what happened to them in the original Unreal 2 levels (bar a few exceptions) and I want to avoid that, maybe try and make them more interesting and engaging.
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