Ultimate Game Design : Building game worlds

C H A P T E R 5
You will probably either have several kinds of dialog to write yourself or work
with a contract professional writer, depending on budget and team style. Characters
will provide voiceover narration to accompany intros, segues, mission endings, level
endings, and game endings, and will sometimes make directional or guidance-oriented
commentary. Characters might even teach the player to play the game.
The following are some more practical considerations for creating and using dialog:
� When you display dialog (and you still want the game playable with audio
turned off or inaccessible), how will you present it to the player?
� Will the dialog need to be localized or translated for worldwide audiences?
This can have a practical impact on interface design, because the symbols
and lettering for certain languages require a minimum pixel dimension
display space in order to be legible onscreen.
� For localization purposes, all language functionality should print to the screen
(not be embedded or “drawn into” screen graphics or interface elements).
This is done by planning for localization early in development so that your
display system for languages can be switched in the game code.
It’s important not to leave all the writing details on the floor to snowball at the end
of the project. In fact, you really can’t, because placeholder or “close to final” dialog
will be required along the development path to gauge effectiveness and to help build
up game details.
Like motion capture, planning to record dialog takes intensive preparation and planning.
Again, you want to try to avoid needing massive redos. You may not get the
chance! Depending on several production factors, you may be recording “audio as you
go” through the process of building your game. In other cases, you might be recording
90 percent of all the in-game audio over a few intense days, or a single week.
Add to these constraints the fact that many games these days are built around licensed
properties (like Terminator 3 or a Star Wars related title). Characters from
these well-known properties that appear in the game may require the voices of the actors
who performed them in the movies or on TV. The amount of interest and participation
for recording game dialog from these actors and/or studios can be very high or
very low. I haven’t found anybody in the middle yet. The demands on time for these
actors can obviously be a critical factor as well. In short, unless you’ve done considerable
planning and shown some good old-fashioned project foresight, you might very
well miss the opportunity to get an actor to deliver the line that will put your game
over the top.
Add to this bubbling stew the fact that actors may be recording other kinds of
“promotional” work for other parties that day (in other words, your game dialog got
jammed somewhere into an already overly aggressive recording schedule) and you
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