Here is a piece evaluating my work on the MMO quest chain I designed in the previous post.
For this story world piece, I attempted to make a quest chain for a pro-magic faction that the player can ally with in the St. Petersburg hub. I decided to focus on creating the dialogue that would serve to convey the player’s objectives and provide flavour and colour to the story world. This would be done by creating two NPCs that would have unique personalities and character voices.
In game, the dialogue would be delivered in text boxes that would appear when the appropriate character was interacted with, like in other MMOs such as World of Warcraft (Blizzard, 2004). I thought that this design choice would add another layer of challenge as emoting through text can be difficult as described in The Game Narrative Toolbox (Heussner, et al. 2015, p.177).
The NPCs I created were Black Phillip, a liaison between the player and the Children of Ved’ma faction and Ved’ma, the eponymous, shapeshifting leader of the faction. The Children of Ved’ma, themselves, are a radical underground network of Gifted and other allies that perform acts of guerrilla warfare against The Guild that controls St. Petersburg. They are locked in covert warfare with The Guild and hold an unsteady alliance with the other anti-establishment groups located around the city.
For Phillip’s dialogue I tried to give him the voice of a raffish rogue. He has an educated air that is tempered by his streetwise lexicon, this was to make him not come off as too bookish as that kind of person would not last very long as the front face of a guerrilla organisation. He is openly friendly towards the player, this was to draw the player in and develop a bond of friendship/trust between the two.
Ved’ma’s dialogue was designed to make them seem mystical, wise and suspicious; so, despite them being in the centre of the conflict between Gifted and The Guild, their manner of speaking seems to elevate them above it. To do this I had them speak in absolutes and have them ensure the player that what they were doing was morally the right thing to do even though they are being ordered to kill “innocent” Guild members.
This quest chain is set during the end game of the MMORPG, meaning that the player has reached maximum level and is at the height of their abilities. This decision was made because players who have reached this stage would already be heavily invested in the hub world and their enthusiasm would then be rewarded by allowing them to have an impact on their game world by choosing a faction to take over St. Petersburg with.
The lecture given on character and dialogue is the main reason I have chosen to focus on this piece. I wanted to try establishing unique character voices through opening and closing quest dialogue and decided to use my experience of ad-libbing dialogue for Dungeons and Dragons (Gygax, 1974) games to my advantage.
Inspired by the lecture I brought in a character concepting technique I am fond of from D&D. It involves getting an index card and writing on it the name of the character, what they do, a few words on their personality, a short physical description and a goal or something they want.
I learned this technique from The Lazy Dungeon Master (Shea, 2012, Chpt. 4), a book about effective and light weight concepting techniques to run D&D games with minimal preparation. Despite being a D&D tool, it works well for any creative medium where keeping multiple characters and locations in development at once is important.
The tool was particularly useful for this exercise because writing dialogue for multiple characters is challenging, especially when you want the characters to sound unique. Using the tool makes this easier as you have a note of the defining traits of a character that can be referred to whenever you need to, allowing you to quickly create dialogue that feels authentic to that character.
Another feature of the tool is that it is meant to keep your character rolling with the chaotic narrative punches that players can throw at you during a D&D game. I found this aspect of the tool great as it allows you to keep relatively detached from ideas instead of becoming too invested and refusing to kill your darlings if the time comes for that.
For this exercise I felt that I managed to achieve my design goals by creating two characters that have their own distinct feel and personalities. I found the process of being able to incorporate D&D preparation techniques into my workflow was an enjoyable and cathartic experience.
The number of transferable design skills I found I had accrued from playing table top role-playing games was surprising and I cannot overstate their usefulness. They are excellent for swiftly prototyping ideas on paper and then being used as reference material later on which helps your separate ideas retain tonal and aesthetic consistency.
To improve upon these designs in future I would work on adding detail to the interactions between the Children of Ved’ma and the other factions in St.Petersburg and create barks and other dialogue that would add even more flavour to the game world and make the factions feel like living, breathing entities themselves.
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