As our world designer is hard to contact and usually never in class, me and Izzy have decided to both team up and make the narrative ourselves. As I had the most experience in narrative storytelling through dialogues and know roughly how the dialogues work in dating simulators, I’ve decided to get the ball rolling by writing the introduction dialogues so it acts like a guideline and be the editor for Izzy’s dialogues.
Drafting the intro:
Chosen Layout: Film Script
I have made a Google document for me and Izzy to make the dialogues. I decided to (sort of) adopt the classical screenplay layout as in my opinion, it looks quite straightforward to understand. There is a key highlighted at the top of the document so that it’ll be easier for our technical designer to input in the game. Here is a video I looked at before writing the script:
Key Takeaways:
Slug lines or scene headers state where the scene takes place. It’s also imperative that it’s stated whether the scene is interior (INT.) or exterior (EXT.) then state where the setting is, I.E café. Finally state whether the scene takes place during night or day.
Action lines are paragraphs or sentences of action that lets the audience know what is going on. Anything that the actor should specifically wear needs to be stated CLEARLY.
Alterations I will make to our layout:
At the time of writing this, I want to make sure that the script will be easily read and easy to type out. Rather than sticking to a traditional screenplay layout, I am adjusting a few things so that it is more simple to implement in game. Some of the things I will alter are: action lines will be written in italic, dialogues will be aligned left of the page and will simply use the character’s name followed by a colon (character: Dialogue), sound effects will be in square brackets and in capitals and finally, choices will be in bold.
I believe this way, me and Izzy can make a script that is efficiently finished in such a short time frame.
Intro Script:
At the end of a scene I communicated that if the player were to read this at a leisurely pace, it would reach the maximum time, but if the player skimmed the dialogues (like what I sometimes do in dating sim games) it will consequently take a shorter amount of time. This is important to remember as when we showcase our work at the end of year show, people will be skimming our game to get to the other games on display.
When I was reading through Izzy’s script, I was very impressed with how she nailed the fluidity of the dialogues! (Big well done to her)
Aside from the normal grammatical checks and few dialogue tweaks, I made a few suggestions (highlighted in blue) and an idea (highlighted in purple) we could incorporate into the game:
Final version of script the team will be utilising: