This article spoils the end of Unreal II.
Just sayin'.
Going over the Managing a Mod Project presentation again reawoke a collection of old mental processes. It's fun creating inside a game environment, watching your ideas come to life and then jumping in and being among them is something that only a few media can provide. Maybe that's how architects feel when they walk around a building that began life as a few scrawls in the back of a notebook, or how a composer feels when he conducts an orchestra playing a piece that came to him on a bus one day.
So I've got an itch to scratch again. Maybe I can summon enough optimism to drown the doubts raised by the frustrations of previous attempts.
Let's entertain the thought for a moment. If I was going to make a mod, what kind of mod would it be? I don't understand all these teams who want to replicate a game they've played before. There are so many groups trying to reproduce the next Counterstrike, the next Team Fortress, one for every game that reached a reasonable level of popularity. If I had the time, the energy and the skills to put a mod project together (which I might) why would I want to squander it producing something that already exists? Nope, if I make a mod it'll have to be an experiment in something.
There's a book on my bookcase called Creating Emotion in Games, written by David Freeman. I bought it as an 'also bought' from Amazon when I bought The Indie Game Development Survival Guide by David Michael who I met and spoke to briefly at Free Play. Creating Emotion in Games is, as far as I know, the only book written specifically about writing scripts for videogames.
It's an odd book, I've dipped into it a few times and I've always left it with a heavy cloud of cynicism hanging over my head. Freeman's approach is to subdivide and categorise ways of treating game character dialogue. Many of his distinctions and labels seem forced to me, a justification for his own internal processes that he wants the rest of the world to believe is the Right Way to do things. Much of it is smothered in Freeman's personal vocabulary, repackaged as the jargon for games writing and there's just something about its ideolectic nature that leaves a slightly processed aftertaste in the back of my mouth.
But let's be fair, I've never written a script for anything, let alone a videogame character, so who am I to tell if Freeman is the fount of all knowlege on the subject or just filling pages to sell? I've written dialogue in prose, so maybe I can deal with it. An experiment in character writing then, something heavily AI scripted but trying for the less travelled path, if not something that has never been tried before. And while I'm at it I'll try and employ some of Freeman's techniques and see if his approach adds anything to the process.
Which game to mod? From grim experience I can say that it's better to try and mod in concert with an engine's capabilities, rather than to try and bend it to your will. It's bigger and stronger than you are and you're only going to look silly when it kicks your ass. Firstly, I need a game that has an editing suite available. The successor to Deus Ex, Invisible War, has no such thing and is poorer for that, I think, but given the lack of productivity from the original title's mod community you can hardly blame them. In any case, Cassandra was based on the first Deus Ex which was based on the first Unreal and taught me more about Unreal technology than anything else, so a latter release of the Unreal engine would mean that knowledge wasn't stored in vain.
Unreal II is the only latter-day Unreal game that supports character dialogue, the point of the experiment, without hunting down an extension written by another modder, so let's have a look at that.
Unreal II was a disappointing game for me. Like so many games it promised a great deal in the previews but never really delivered in as strong a voice. The main storyline was such an unashamedly hackneyed recycling that I can think of at least two other games that had virtually the same plot. Aside from the main story arc it was mostly a rigidly linear rubberstamp shooter.
That said, it did try a couple of things worthy of mulling over. In the story Unreal II tried to evoke the camaraderie of the small and tightly confined crew of the Atlantis. If you manage to play through to the end (for which I applaud your stoicism) this was obviously a set-up for the 'shock' ending, in which they all die horribly in a blatent attempt to claim Spielberg's Holy Grail of having you in floods of tears on Level 17. If I hadn't been marginally more moved by the last episode of Blake's Seven twenty years ago (aged 12), then I might have given that more of a nod. The relationship with your three fellow crewspeople is developed through 'tween' levels, as you return to your ship after each solo mission, I think the game might've stood a better chance of making me care about these characters if they'd played a bigger part in all the hard work, instead of representing obstacles to be circumvented before the next shooty bit.
However, the Atlantis sections do demonstrate a sophisticated dialogue mechanism and that's exactly what we're looking for.
The other mildly interesting aspect of Unreal II regards the combat levels. In more than a couple of places you are given basic command of friendly troops and can quite robustly boss them around. Interesting, because one of the major stumbling blocks in Cassandra was that the NPCs just refused to do what they were fecking told. On a related note, more than a few of those levels involved you organising static defenses of one kind or another, including more than one observed instance of AI bots deploying their own densive equipment. This is more than passing evidence of a solid scripting system.
So we have Unreal technology with which I have a degree of familiarity in poking around, support for complicated branching conversations and circumstantial evidence of being able to make the bots do as they're told. Looks promising. All that remains now is to have a think about the direction to try and take it in.
Comments: on the _blackbored