Chaos Chronicles Dialogue System Blog Update

The folks at Coreplay have penned a brief development blog on Chaos Chronicles’ dialogue system. Like many titles in the same genre, the turn-based indie RPG is going to feature dialogue trees with full lines, unique dialogue options depending on character. Here’s a snip:

Apart from being good-looking it provides the power of lua-script that we already use to trigger stuff like levers, traps and secret doors. That means a designer can easily reward you with any object in a dialogue, or set an NPC’s faction to hostile if you insult him. Even better, the script allows for checks of the player character so certain dialogue options are only available if you char’s intelligence or charisma matches a certain minimum value, or only if he is an elf. They are even able to create easter eggs like, let’s say an NPC that only talks to you if your party consists entirely of dwarves. Now, we are looking forward to use this mighty new tool to complete all dialogues in Chaos Chronicles and we are eager to see how it will help us to sew the story and the world together and provide all the characters (and especially NPCs that join your party) with an appearance that is both deep and real.

Of course, our budget and development time won’t allow us to replace Fallout New Vegas’ entry in the Guinness Book of Records (with 65.000 lines of dialogue in a single player RPG). On the other hand it is quite obvious that quantity cannot make up for quality and rather than having thousands of lines to read, it is more important that your conversations do in fact have an impact on how the world evolves and on the path your character chooses. For example, it is important that you have real choices rather than just being only provided with a couple of answers that all turn out with the same result. With the story almost finished and level construction coming to an end we will keep all that in mind when giving Chaos Chronicles the ‘˜finishing touch’ in terms of story-telling.

Thanks, RPGWatch.