Development Insight - Dialogue and Scene Paths (Patreon)

Greetings all you wonderful Patrons, supporters, and fans of Erolon Dungeon Bound!

In today's post, we wanted to share with you a feature of our game that you may not know about: dialogue and scene paths!

What is a dialogue path you may be wondering? To put it simply, it's a change or alteration in dialogue depending on what choices you've made previously!

To further explain how it works, let's take a look at a basic diagram showing one of the ways a branching dialogue may occur.

Most of the time when you're prompted with conversation choices, the outcome is fairly straightforward. You make your selection, and the appropriate outcome takes place. Sometimes you'll get the same outcome regardless of the choice, but the concept is still the same.

Player has two dialogue choices in a scene.

If the player chooses the first option...

Outcome #1 Occurs

If the player chooses Option #2

Outcome #2 Occurs (Notice the alternate dialogue and relationship increase?)

Where things get interesting however, is when you've made previous dialogue choices that end up affecting future scenes and/or dialogue. Changes to scenes can occur from different factors, such as your current number of relationships, how far along you are in a relationship, or previous dialogue choices you've made.

The majority of the changes that occur are alternate dialogues with characters. They may react differently or say something specific to what you had chosen or done previously. This offers a fun spin on scenes to show how your choices can create alternate reactions.

But sometimes a scene can be impacted more drastically. To show an example of this, let's take a look at the Desert introduction scene first made available in version 0.09.

POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD IF YOU HAVEN'T MADE IT THIS FAR IN THE GAME YET!

In this sequence, the protagonist begins to hallucinate in the harsh, dry environment of the desert.

It's during this section that the game's programming checks to see if you are currently in any relationships with the other characters.

For example, if you are in a relationship with Leru the Paladin, you will see the following hallucination sequence with her...

If you are in a relationship with Veloris the Cleric, you'll see this sequence instead...

But what happens if you're in a relationship with both the Cleric and the Paladin?

The player will still see the Paladin and the Cleric by themselves as shown above. 

But then, something entirely new will occur...

Both the Paladin and the Cleric will appear before the player, and completely unique dialogue will take place!

We've always liked games that take into account the choices you make, and that's why we always want to have them in our games.

We take big inspiration from the mechanics and design of games like Mass Effect, Fallout, Deus Ex, and Persona when designing these kinds of features!

We hope you enjoyed reading and viewing this development insight! We're hoping to post more of these kinds of insights in the future!

Cheers everyone!