45 different endings to Don't Be Dinner. Holy crap. To make sure the dialogue choices are somewhat thought out, I've begun designing dialogue trees for each character so implementation of each tree should go a lot faster when that time comes.
But how exactly am I designing a dialogue tree?
Well, each knight in Don't Be Dinner has their own motivations and in many cases, it doubles as their fatal flaw. For instance, maybe the Purple Knight wants to kill the forest troll to get at his horde of treasure (hey, that's not a bad idea!). Not only is it motivating the knight, but it's most likely what is going to get him killed.
So take that character and motivation and drop them into some diagram software of some sort (I'm using Open Office Draw) and start building boxes and lines defining the paths the dialogue could take. Simple. The hard part is filling out all those boxes and lines with written dialogue!
The yellow box above is the start of the scene and each blue box is a decision point where the player picks an option based on something the other character says. In the final versions this diagram is more color coded but I don't want to give away all my secrets ;)
In the final version there will be 5 playable characters, each with a different look, motivation/flaw, and completely unique endings. Currently I have 2 of five completed and with a little more time should be able to get the others done in a timely fashion.
There will be quite a bit of 'comedy' in the game. Not laugh out loud, but should provide a slight grin if you recognize some of the slight references to other games, movies, and media. Keep an eye here on IndieDB for more detailed information in the future on each of the knights you'll be playing as in Don't Be Dinner!
