You are viewing an old version of this page. View the current version.

Compare with Current View Page History

« Previous Version 19 Next »

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, TextEditor3, and the game, ClickToSpeak. TextEditor3 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 TextEditor3, 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. TextEditor3 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 examine the XML file using TextEditor3.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Instructions for installing and testing Click to Speak:

  1. Go to Perforce directory 2009/OneButton/Publish or shared drive folder 2010/Click To Speak.
  2. Install TextEditor3.air and ClickToSpeak.air (the text editor and the playable game, respectively).
  3. The sample xml file game.xml and the audio file folder Draft_Record are saved in Test_with_new_relative_path_system. It's important that game.xml is saved in the same folder as Draft_Record for the sample game to run. (In previous builds you have to worry about where they were saved relative to the application, but we've changed the way file paths work, so you can save the application anywhere you like.)
  4. To use the editor: Start TextEditor3. 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 opening game.xml.
  5. To run game: Start ClickToSpeak. Click Load Game and select game.xml as the game file. Click Start Game to play.

A text version of the test game is in Perforce //depot/2009/OneButton/cts-script.docx.

  • No labels