SimDialog: A Visual Game Dialog Editor

Charles Owen, Frank Biocca, Corey Bohil and Jason Conley

Abstract

SimDialog is a visual editor for dialog in computer games. This paper presents the design of SimDialog, illustrating how script writers and non-programmers can easily create dialog for video games with complex branching structures and dynamic response characteristics. The system creates dialog as a directed graph. This allows for play using the dialog with a statebased cause and effect system that controls selection of non-player character responses and can provide a basic scoring mechanism for games.