Summary:
As gameplay engineer I focused on two big major features in Sorelle: a dialogue system powering the whole game, and a ground pound mechanic for one of the characters. Here you’ll find more info about those.
Ground Pound mechanic
Initially designed as a single action with 3 steps; an automated small boost, a freeze at the top where the character does an animation and then going straight down with force. You can see an illustration on the right.
Playtesting showed players disliked the lack of control with the initial big boost, so we split it into two abilities: a double jump and a Ground Pound, similar to games like Jak and Daxter.
The Dialogue System
Since Sorelle is a 3D adventure game with multiple NPCs, quests, and cinematics, the dialogue system needed to be Modular, and easy to use, to both the design team’s needs and player actions. Yarn Spinner, a popular Unity plugin served as inspiration.
The goal was to create a system that could deliver dialogue in multiple ways, so I created an Unreal Engine Subsystem with Actor Components. The Actor Component allowed designers to enable any in-game object to trigger narrative.
The designer just needs to tell the system what Conversation to play and other info. For example, NPC conversations block input, while callouts, dialogue that plays as the player roams, do not. The system could also send a callback when a conversation ended. For example, after an NPC conversation, it could trigger a function to add an item to the inventory or perform other actions.
Blueprint editing for Designers
I created a visual interface to edit everything related to a ‘dialoguer’ item in the game, from the conversation to play to other settings, making it easy to test the narrative on the go.
Spreadsheet template for Writers
I defined a spreadsheet template for writers to follow, so they didn’t need to open the engine at all. They simply provided the spreadsheets, and designers would set them up as DataTables in UE5, streamlining their workflow.
Prototyping features
In our process we tried different things like the ability for the player to choose between multiple dialogue responses. But after some discussion, we realized this would add a lot of extra writing work without really enhancing the core experience. So, we cut it in favor of a more linear narrative.
NPC
Player can talk to NPC and receive Quests after conversation ends.
Cinematics
The system integrates with all the cinematics in the game
Callouts
Pieces of narrative that don’t interrupts gameplay