Today I started to produce Teddy’s interaction script however, instead of showing a step by step guide of how I made and edited the script, I will provide snippets from the script and discuss them.
Within Teddy’s interaction script, I decided to keep his speech to a minimum due to his role of ‘healer’ within our game. With this role, the player is expected to return to him whenever their energy is depleted and therefore would have to witness this Interaction script many times. Because of this, keeping a short length script for Teddy will not disrupt the players state of flow when requiring healing – with big bulks of text leaving the player feeling disassociated with the game whilst they skip over it. However, I decided to show Teddy’s personality through the side quest of Polo (Another character within our game/demo), showing his personality to players who value lore story over gameplay – as players who decide to earn experience through interacting with NPC’s over Hacking robots may value that more.
Within Teddy’s own interaction script, the player can see his caring yet unique personality through him talking in third person. Due to the lack of his own interaction script I decided to implement my research of creating unique characters by giving him the mannerism of speaking in third person – compensating on his lack of speech by making his personality memorable. In addition, by making him unique and memorable the player will be more likely to remember that he plays the role of ‘healer’ and therefore have an easier time finding him.
Through Polo’s Interaction script, I kept his mannerism consistent and maintained the third person talk – further helping the players immersion and sense of flow. Within this dialogue, I tried to include some more sophisticated dialogue to both represent his higher education whilst also helping our younger audiences learn through our game. On the other hand, I only included this technique once, as to not break the player’s flow and keep the game/demo easy to understand.
Overall, I feel that Teddy’s Interaction dialogue was successful and was immensely benefitted by the improvisation session I held playing as him – allowing me to think as he would and ‘talk’ as he would – allowing me to make a more realistic character because of it. If I were to have more time in the future, I would consider weaving Teddy within more quests as to further display his personality. Through this, it would also reinforce the sense of teamwork and community with the NPC’s of our game (one stimuli for our game) whilst sending the message of being nice to other people to the player.