About Click to Speak:
Click to Speak is a tool for building and running a dialogue-based game. It comes in two parts: the editor, AudioEditor, and the game, ClickToSpeak. AudioEditor allows you to construct a dialogue tree of textual lines and audio files, and ClickToSpeak runs the game based on the dialogue tree.
The game works as follows: There is a PC and an NPC--in our sample game, Agent 008 and Dr. Nefarious, respectively. The player gets one button to push. While the NPC is talking, the player may push that button at any time to interrupt the NPC with a response. Depending on when the button is pushed, the PC will respond in different ways to what the NPC just said.
For example, suppose the NPC's first line starts with "Hello". If the button is pressed at this point, the PC might simply respond with "Hi! How are you?" If the NPC is not interrupted and gets to continue talking, he/she might say, "Hello. And how is Fluffy doing?", leading the PC to respond with a comment on Fluffy's health. If the NPC still isn't interrupted, the full line might turn out to be, "Hello. And how is Fluffy doing? Nice cat, Fluffy. Too bad if something were to happen to her..." Now the PC's next line would become a reaction to the threat. And so on.
If you're interested, there's also some background on the game idea in this writeup of Marleigh's talk at GDC: http://www.gamespot.com/news/6280781.html
In AudioEditor, the text lines are marked with asterisks to indicate how far into the NPC's line the PC's response changes. Draggable breakpoints serve the same purpose in the audio files. AudioEditor also contains a second tab, which stores the background music, the "end game" message, and the audio prompt played if the user does not press the button by the end of the NPC's line. It will probably become clearer how all this works if you play the sample game a few times in ClickToSpeak and then open the XML file in AudioEditor.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Instructions for installing and testing Click to Speak
- Go to Perforce directory 2009/OneButton/Publish or shared drive folder 2010/Click To Speak.
- Install AudioEditor and ClickToSpeak (the text editor and the playable game, respectively).
- Make sure to save test_with_relativePath.xml and the Draft_Record folder in the same folder where you installed the two applications. (This is important! The application needs to know where to find the audio files, so they have to be saved in the right place. If ClickToSpeak runs but does not play any sounds, this is probably why. Note that the folder the applications are installed in is distinct from the folder the Air files are saved in.)
- To use the editor: Start AudioEditor. The initial pop-up box is for filling in character names, and is really only useful when you're starting a new game file; otherwise, just X out of it. You can view the dialogue tree for our sample game by clicking Open in the File menu and selecting test_with_relativePath.xml.
- To run game: Start ClickToSpeak. Click Load Game and select test_with_relativePath.xml as the game file. Click Start Game to play.