Cross-World Conversations

Cross-World Conversations is currently an interactive story demo containing probably a few hundred lines of dialogue and random sass.

I spent about maybe six consecutive hours fiddling with a dialogue package from the unity asset store to make an interactive story that could probably be better made in something like Twine.

Oh well. It was fun to work with dialogue nodes, and I manually coded a section to handle the "reading style" to pause for certain characters such as periods and commas.

This project has about 270 dialogue nodes (which includes message boxes as well as option boxes), three parameter variables to keep track of dialogue routes and loops, and of course a convoluted flow from one to another. There's about five "endings," though plenty of random details sprinkled about that don't really end anything.

The purpose of the project is mainly just to test dialogue trees, as well as "general story-writing ability." A fun personal project done in a day.

If I do put effort into completing this project in its entirety, I'll add art, character sprites, music, and sound. Oh. And of course the actual mechanic of the story.

The idea is that you have different "character cartridges," two from each "world." To start a conversation, you select a character cartridge for you and your conversationalist. This will include needlessly complex and numerous scenarios to play out. 

This conversation would be "The Player & The Narrator." This would be different from "The Narrator & The Player" conversation, where you enter the same scenario from the perspective of The Narrator.

Here's some character ideas just for the record:

• Cross-World Conversations
  • The Player: Weird rebellious blank slate I guess?
  • The Narrator: Self-referencing, cold, somewhat sassy
• Happy-Go-Lucky Detective World
  • Harry: Detective sibling, respectful, logical
  • Holly: Detective sibling, casual, somewhat immature
• War World
  • Soldier 208: war vet, looking to protect the weak, guilt ridden
  • S.A.R.A.H.: robot advisor, cold, dislikes humanity
• Dating Sim World
  • Hazel: painfully naive, easily flustered, comically insecure
  • Mocha: basically just tsundure idk what else to tell you
• Simplistic RPG World
  • The Chosen One: detrimentally simple moral system, brute forces a lot
  • The Dark Lord: evil out of boredom, somehow kind at heart

Which would be about 100 different conversation trees to write. More like 90, since I don't think I'll have characters talking to copies of themselves. But still. I do not think I should replicate the complexity that this project already has a hundred times. That would be, like, 500 working hours, being about six months of casual working. I might also run into creative burnout if I tried to do that.

I'm certainly not short of "proof of concept" projects that never make it to their full scope. A hobbyist casual programmer can only do so much.

*Edit: Writing is easier than coding.

Enjoy this mess.


Built using:
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/utilities/dialogue-editor-168329