Conversation in RPGs

Published June 22, 2005
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My conversaion screen scrolls upward and I have VCR style controls at the bottom that allow you to control the rate of scroll, or stop the conversation if you prefer.

Here's a screen shot:




Now, I've been having an arguement with my brother over how I should work the conversation screen. He believes I should feed the lines to the player one or two at a time requiring them to hit the space bar after having read each line. I personally think the way it's done is fine, and if the player wants to read the story they will, if they don't they'll just stop the scroller. I personally get really annoyed with games where I have to hit space 6 times if I don't feel like reading the monolog.

I thought I would ask opinions about RPGs and the stories in them. Do you read the text? If so how do you prefer it be presented?

I started a thread on Game Dev Here

Epoch Star - Space RPG / Space Adventure Game
0 likes 2 comments

Comments

paulecoyote
Hmmm as long as you can set the speed of the text I think 1 or 2 at a time is fine.
June 23, 2005 04:26 PM
DrGUI
I think scrolling text is fine, but I'm silly so I couldn't use the VCR buttons inituitively (I haven't watched videos in aeons!) and I think it would be better if you had a little slider for the speed, drag to the left to stop/pause it and drag to right to get it over with in half a second if people don't want to read the text.
This would also solve my problem of the half speed being way too slow and having to race to read the text on normal speed (and I've always read a lot of books and learnt to read at an early age so I think I can read quite fast - much faster than my dad...btw are you meant to be able to read all the credits at the end of films? Betcha they just skim it past to satisfy their contract...meep I'm rambling...)

If possible, I would be boring and like all of the text on screen at once and not moving [grin] but that may not be doable I know.

Hope that helps!

~Will rate for pie~
Mmmmmm...pie
Vegetarian of course [grin]
July 01, 2005 12:52 PM
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