SimDialog: A visual game dialog editor

SimDialog: A Visual Game Dialog Editor 1 Running head: SIMDIALOG SIMDIALOG: A VISUAL GAME DIALOG EDITOR Charles B. Owen, Frank Biocca, Corey Bohil, Jason Conley Michigan State University East Lansing MI SimDialog: A Visual Game Dialog Editor 2 Abstract SimDialog is a visual editor for dialog in computer games. This paper presents the design of SimDialog, illustrating how script writers and non-programmers can easily create dialog for video games with complex branching structures and dynamic response characteristics. The system creates dialog as a directed graph. This allows for play using the dialog with a statebased cause and effect system that controls selection of non-player character responses and can provide a basic scoring mechanism for games. SimDialog: A Visual Game Dialog Editor 3 Introduction A challenge in the design of computer games is writing, organizing, and testing nonlinear dialog involving multiple user options and branches to many different possible character responses. One form of these are dialog trees (Bateman 2007) -- scripts that allow for multiple user inputs and character responses. We have developed SimDialog, a visual editor for complex nonlinear game dialog. The SimDialog system consists of an editor program that allows authors to design complex conversations with multiple options and a runtime component that manages the progression through the conversation during game play. SimDialog makes it easy for game writers and non-programmers to create dialog for computer games directly without having to edit complex file formats or pass their work to programmers who must then embed the dialog in the game program.