Avant Garde - Part 3

The week is closing, but I want to talk about talking: dialog and exposition heavy cut scenes.  What games tend to do has seemingly been done all along.  What is my issue with it?  Where can we go from there and would it even be interesting.  And finally, what does all this have to do with my game?

Conversations in video games are usually very dynamically sterile or statically exciting.  That is you either get a list of choices to make or you have no control at all.  The former may bely a bevy of information or a tidbit of emotion, but to me it feels cold and unnatural.  You talk to a NPC, the game pauses to give you a menu of options, you choose one of these usually extreme things to "say", and they deliver yet another monologue in response.  On the other hand you may not be given any opportunity for input and the dialog is rolled out cut-scene style.

Neither of these are bad, but they're not new either.  Dragon Age is getting a lot of attention as the latest next-gen RPG and while the writing is top-notch, the interactivity presented to the player is the same menu trope described above.  And, as many games categorized under that genre, you don't hear your character speak.  The conversations become so one-way, I feel as though the story and most situations would have been better served with a single aggregate menu at the beginning of a conversation (what did you want to talk about?) and just see where it goes from there.  Leaving out the player character's voice, you're just going to be listening to someone else speak the entire time anyway.

Gothic 2 is one of the few gems I played where your character has a voice.  It is a way to transport you into that character, because even the generic dialog tree becomes an opportunity to hear it all spoken and played out almost like a real conversation.  Ron Gilbert's Death Spank does this too, as I saw at PAX, and it draws you deeper into the world.  So even given the pause-select choices, can't we at least hear what we're saying? I'd rather the developers spend more time getting voices for my character than a bunch of townsfolk doling out generic kill/gather quests.  Heck, make them the silent ones.

There's also passive dialog which shows up not only in cut-scenes but places where you "talk" a character and they stop to say something.  In the olden days this would be a big box of text that would probably pause the game, but now they'll speak without it interrupting any of your control.  You still can't do anything about it (with the exception of attacking them) and they'll continue even if you run away before they finish.  This adds a humorous effect of them "talking to no one", but doesn't do anything to help the immersion.

Other people have begun to itch from this prohibitive style, and I seem to hear it more and more often.  As much as I like to hear my own voice, it's pleasing not to preach things it feels only I care about.  In particular the requirement of watching cut-scenes to absorb semi-necessary information has rubbed myself and others raw.  The player wants to play your game, using its mechanics and style, otherwise they'd be watching a movie.  This isn't to say some games revolve around this, but many that employ the technique aren't.

In the beginning of my game, and up until yesterday, I had decided on some relatively complex, but free-flowing controls for conversation.  Coincidentally I saw some of these display, sort of, in this trailer for Owl Boy: his options are merely emotional responses.  Mine obviously wasn't an original idea and it imposed seriously complications on my independent development, especially knowing how I would further expand on the concept.  Instead I've opted to do something more along the lines of Tale of Tales' The Path.: you don't press any keys or buttons to talk to someone and you don't actively choose replies or even topics.  How will it work?  I guess you'll just have to play the prototype in March to find out!

However, none of what I've described provides any further insight into the inspiration behind the game.  So here it is: what I always wanted to do was hear TTS (Text-To-Speech, i.e. Speech Synthesis) used to produce dynamic audio.  For example, you could hear your character's custom name spoken in the course of normal dialog!  This technology is terribly inappropriate for most circumstances, as it is in its very early stages, but the way to push it forward is to use and abuse it.  So I decided to make my game revolve around a race of synthetic people (e.g. robots) who basically assume they're human beings.

Even though the story and peoples have remained the same, I no longer have a design which encompasses dynamically-produced audio and my license for the software doesn't account for it either.  I'm taking a baby step.  Voices will be pre-rendered sound files that are packaged with the game and played at the appropriate time.  Hopefully in a couple years it will be streamed, and cached, from a server - complete dynamic.

Well, that's it for the three inspirations behind my game.  If you want to keep updated more frequently on its progress, go to http://metrosynth.com/.