When I started designing this game, the first thing that came to my mind was this: an empty universe with only humans and an Android train driving on the road. What kind of conversation will they have? What kind of conflict will they have? This is how I designed it from the beginning.
But soon I found that my settings were very inadequate. Even with the context built into the story, the introduction of dialogue is very blunt. What cannot be avoided is the determination of the character’s character and the importance of the character’s “change”. Generally speaking, we first set a character for the character in the story, and then something happens that changes his character from the original concept.
Therefore, the first question comes: can it have a huge impact on the minds of the characters if only relying on the short dialogue on the train?
This question reminds me of the movie “The man from earth” I watched. Through the way of storytelling, the protagonist in the film made the biologists, historians and psychologists who listened to the story gradually believed that he was a caveman who lived for 14,000 years. The whole movie is presented in dialogue, there are not too many events, only dialogue. How does it change people from “don’t believe” to “believe”?
Ask questions and answer them.
Everyone has their own doubts. No matter how firm the outlook on life may be, it may find a place where it is not so perfect. Look for those dots and let out the facts. When people see things they can’t see, their concepts will change.
The second question: How can we retain the knowledge background of the human character in the dialogue, but at the same time allow the player to substitute this character?
The most common method in games is to make characters amnesia. This allows the character to retain a sense of immersion in the player while retaining its past story. Even if the character itself is not amnesic, when he experiences this experience in the game, at least he has the same unknown understanding of the story as the player.
At this point, my prototype is failing. I was so hopeful that the player could see the reversal in the story, so I designed the investigators to be scheming in some of the storylines, even knowing Android’s conspiracy before the dialogue. This not only makes the player feel inexplicable about the dialogue during the game, but also does not feel like a real reversal-because it is the player who makes the reversal.
In the next design, I will pay more attention to the point that really makes the character “change”, and pay attention to the synchronization of the information of the character and the player as much as possible, so as to make the story more exciting and the player more immersive.