Un-Happy Birthday - Experimenting with Dialogue Systems in Immmersive Environments

In the town of Eorm live a Lord and Lady with a complicated relationship. You enter Eorm and quickly discover that this couple is in the midst of their most recent trouble. In Un-Happy Birthday you'll discover what ails Eorm, and find a way to make this quarreling couple content once more.

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During the build of this project I've learned the Dialogue System by Pixel Crushers and created a simple role-playing story using their built-in tools and assets.

 The main feature of Dialogue System is, of course, the dialogue tree feature in which you can build a branching narrative to provide players with a more natural and immersive interactive experience. This in and of itself was a feat to learn as there are many moving parts to a single character's dialogue tree. I made use of the conditional branching functions of the tool to simulate a progressing narrative that updated as the player spoke to different NPCs. 

I had the most amount of fun manipulating the camera sequencer. This feature allows you to interject camera cuts into specific points in the dialogue which can highlight key points of interest, or help point out to the player where to go next. Getting the child-cameras into the right positions and angles was probably the most challenging part, but also the most rewarding when you create a certain cinematic look to your scene.

I'd like to continue this project. Finishing the the quest line and narrative is a given, but I'd also like to polish up the visuals as well, perhaps throw in some terrain assets so everything isn't so flat-looking. The volumetric lighting and fog at the moment is decent - I'm particularly fond of the light rays I was able to achieve as well as the more atmospheric vibe I was able to convey. The flat-ness of it all definitely holds it all back, however, and I think that it's a great opportunity for improvement.

All-in-all I really enjoyed building this project. I learned a lot about Dialogue System and hope to implement it into my future projects as it's a valuable tool at any designer's disposal.