Document Structure is Half the Battle
One of the most notable challenges in Cosmos Chaos was the design and planning of the dialogue in the game. Quest structures needed to be made, conversations needed to be planned, and dialogue (generously studded with 4th grade vocabulary challenges) needed to be drafted. But it seemed like there were huge gaps between the open, flowing narrative challenge and the brass-tacks generation of tons and tons of scripted dialogue. What to do?
Enter Meagan Rothschild, crack flowchart generator and all-round super helpful person. The answer, it turns out, is to create a bridge of documents that relate to each other; a cascade of related documents that start with big-picture ideas and slowly scale down to single moments of interaction. With her guidance we honed in on a set of processes that became invaluable tools for penning and polishing levels.
We started with Quest Flow diagrams: Visio flow-charts with simple boxes describing logical choke-points, story progression and game world changing events. Each box described an action with a character or NPIO (Non-Player Interactive Object) that would move the game's story forward.
Once a level's Quest Flow was completed, we were able to move on to our "Rosetta Stone" document: the Dialogue Flow. This document was another flow-chart, but instead of being arranged by story, it was arranged by character. Essentially, by stepping through every box in the Quest Flow, we could generate smaller flows that showed the back-and-forth required in each conversation to convey the plot points in the dialogue.
Finally, with our Quest and Dialogue Flows complete, we were armed with all of the information we needed to write the dialogue itself. Using professional script-writing software (Final Draft), we tackled each dialogue branch individually, infusing character and style into each denizen of Cosmos Chaos' strange, strange world. Jokes, emotion and TONS OF VOCABULARY WORDS were poured into each interaction.
With these three documents in hand, it was in fact completely possible to play test the level before a single drop of code was created. We could simply call out where we wanted to go, bring up that dialogue, and step through the story. This was great for getting a sense of the dramatic arc and finding logical gaps...it was also just plain fun.
We truly appreciated the opportunity that the fine folks at PREL and Aloha Island offered us in bringing us on for this project. We're excited to see the game published, and hopefully we can all visit the world of Cosmos Chaos on our Nintendo DS soon!