Cosmos Chaos was one of Filament's first projects. We were hired by partners PREL and Aloha Island to offer our expertise, but the actual knowledge exchange among Filament, PREL and AI was happily a two-way street. Or, I suppose, a three-way street...or maybe it was three two-way streets. I'll diagram it later. ANYWAY...
One of the most notable challenges in Cosmos Chaos was designing and planning the game's dialogue. Quest structures needed to be made, conversations needed to be planned, and dialogue (generously studded with 4th grade vocabulary challenges) needed to be drafted. The challenge was to bridge the huge gap between the open, flowing narrative 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 turned out, was to create a cascade of related documents, starting with big-picture ideas and slowly scaling down to single moments of interaction. With Meagan's 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 comprised of 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 moved 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 necessary plot points.
Finally, with our Quest and Dialogue Flows complete, we were armed with all 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 each level before a single drop of code was created. We could simply call out where we wanted to go, summon the appropriate dialogue and step through the story branch by branch. This was great for getting a sense of the dramatic arc and finding logical gaps...and also just plain fun.
Working on this project with the fine folks at PREL and Aloha Island was a truly an outstanding opportunity. We're excited to see the game published, and hopefully we can all visit the world of Cosmos Chaos on a Nintendo DS soon!
Cosmos Chaos was one of Filament's first projects. We were hired by partners PREL and Aloha Island to offer our expertise, but the actual knowledge exchange among Filament, PREL and AI was happily a two-way street. Or, I suppose, a three-way street...or maybe it was three two-way streets. I'll diagram it later. ANYWAY...
One of the most notable challenges in Cosmos Chaos was designing and planning the game's dialogue. Quest structures needed to be made, conversations needed to be planned, and dialogue (generously studded with 4th grade vocabulary challenges) needed to be drafted. The challenge was to bridge the huge gap between the open, flowing narrative 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 turned out, was to create a cascade of related documents, starting with big-picture ideas and slowly scaling down to single moments of interaction. With Meagan's 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 comprised of 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 moved 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 necessary plot points.
Finally, with our Quest and Dialogue Flows complete, we were armed with all 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 each level before a single drop of code was created. We could simply call out where we wanted to go, summon the appropriate dialogue and step through the story branch by branch. This was great for getting a sense of the dramatic arc and finding logical gaps...and also just plain fun.
Working on this project with the fine folks at PREL and Aloha Island was a truly an outstanding opportunity. We're excited to see the game published, and hopefully we can all visit the world of Cosmos Chaos on a Nintendo DS soon!
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