Narrative Design

Organizing Dialog

To help simplify the process of creating the narrative for the game, it was decided to use spreadsheets to organize the dialog. This method made it easier to lay out the narrative, and helped the narrative editor proofread without needing to go into the Unity engine or play through the game. 
To help make the information within the spreadsheet easier to parse, color coding and indentation was utilized. Our main character’s dialog is tinted in green, non-playable characters dialog is in red, purple was used for conditionals, and blue was used to represent choice based text.

Progression Tracking

As players progress in the game, the non-playable characters (NPC) they encounter’s dialog changes to fit their current goals. Keeping track of these encounters was becoming difficult, so spread sheets were utilized to cross reference an integer used to track progress with what sort of dialog NPCs would provide the player with. The final column in the spreadsheet is used to track where the integer is incremented.