The Broken Hourglass Monday Update

Planewalker Games’ official website has received its usual Monday update for The Broken Hourglass, this time revealing how the team is scripting the game’s dialogue.

Therefore, this is how we get Harika talking:

harika.dlg/harika.d

begin “harika-dialogue” // This is the name of the dialogue resource we ask for in her creature file
begin talk // We will now be creating a state named “talk” inside the “harika-dialogue” dialogue resource
say ~”Welcome to Harika’s. We have a fine selection of scarves. May I interest you in a purchase today?”~ // Harika says this line.
reply ~”Yes, let us trade.”~ do _start_store () exit // The player may choose this reply.
reply ~”No thank you.~ goto comeagain // Or the player may choose this reply.
end // This signifies the end of the “talk” state.

begin comeagain // We are now creating a state called “comeagain” inside harika-dialogue.DLG.
say ~”Perhaps some other time.”~ // Harika speaks this line.
exit // We will not present any replies here, but simply exit dialogue.
end // We end the state “comeagain”.

end // We end the “begin harika-dialogue” statement.

Every time the player clicks on Harika, she will welcome us to her store. As with XML resources, literal strings are enclosed in tildes–the quotation marks reflect a TBH game convention to enclose spoken text in quotation marks. If the player chooses reply 1, the action associated with that transition will be executed; in this case, do _start_store (), which turns the game over to the store interface and opens all of the valid stores associated with Harika. Dialogue mode will exit once we have finished with the store. If the player chooses the second reply option, we proceed (goto) to another state inside harika.DLG, “comeagain.” Harika speaks another line in that case, then we exit dialogue mode.