Conversation Considerations

This episode is a prototype of my planned conversation system. I was actually going to overhaul the conversation system in Day 3 but simply never had time to do so. As a result Day 3 stuck with the old conversation system that was created way back in Day 1. While I would have liked to have more elaborate conversations in Day 3, it wasn't a necessity. The conversation in this episode, however, did need the new system. While I could probably have limited the choices to just 3, the big problem was that in order to understand the conversation properly, full sentences were needed and the old system only had enough room for very concise choices.

To make matters more interesting for me, Adobe decided to release the Flex2SDK beta near this time. The interesting thing about this is that it used the Flash 9 beta (which for a while was referred to as Flash 8.5) which introduced ActionScript 3. While the core of the ActionScript language is the same, there were a number of changes to the class library that made programming ActionScript 3 different from programming ActionScript 2. The change that had me concerned the most was changes to the way the display worked. In my opinion, the display lists that are used in ActionScript 3 are a much nicer way of handling the layering of objects.

This lead to a tough decision. I could develop the new conversation system in ActionScript 2 but then would have to re-code it when I moved to ActionScript 3. Alternatively, I could treat the system like a prototype and leave the bulk of the proper implementation out of the system. This is a very crude way of doing things, but would allow me to test out the ideas I had for the new conversation system while not putting too much effort into code that would have to be re-written later.

The goals for this new conversation system were fairly simple. First, I wanted the ability to have different types of bubbles and choices. That way, it would be possible to have both words the player wishes to say as well as actions the player wishes to perform. Second, and perhaps more important for this episode, was the ability to have full sentences that better lets the player know what they are saying or going to do. Finally I wanted there to be more than three possible choices.