Cutscene Conversations

Telling a story in a computer game is as much about presentation as it is about plot and storyline. Movie dialogs are often as elaborately orchestrated as action scenes, and - if done well - just as dramatic and absorbing.

Many games utilize mechanics from movies. Camera shots and angles switch to a cutscene-like display during conversations. Here you see the villain through the heroes eyes, then a closeup of his face, a wide-angle shot showing them both in profile, then the heroes reaction in a classic over-the-shoulder shot.

Unity Conversation Maker brings the power of these scenes to your game. Easily create branching dialogs that utilize movie-style camera shots, integrate voice-acted lines with textual subtitles and fitting animations, let the camera transition automatically between various shots as the conversation progresses. At the same time, the choices the player makes, or the answers of your NPCs, can trigger game-events from the simple (add 100 gold to the players purse as a reward) to the arbitrarily complex - because UCC does not have a fixed set of actions, but allows you to specify any method you like as a call target.

Features

• easy-to-use inspector interface
• supports animations, audio clips and text subtitles
• branching dialogs
• camera perspectives
• cause dialog to call methods (e.g. to start quests, give out rewards, trigger events, etc.)

Beta Release

Since I don't currently have time to finish this, I'm releasing the beta version free of charge to the community. Do with it as you will, though I would be happy if you could contribute any improvements back to me. If you want to give me some money, use PayPal and send to tom@… - but it's not required. Or you could consider buying some of my  Sky Boxes or my Terrain Tools.

To the right you see what it looks like in the editor. You need to attach the script Dialogs/Conversation.cs to the NPC you want to have talking, or to a dummy object. The important part is that it must have a collider set as trigger to initiate the dialog. Or call the function StartConversation() by some other means.

Some minimal documentation on the functions:

• Repeat Conversation - whether or not the conversation is repeated if the player enters the trigger a second time after completing it before.
• The three numbers below manage the location and layout of the subtitle box

Initially, there will be no dialog elements, add them via the two buttons "Add dialog element" or "Add branching choices".

You can re-order the dialog elements using the up and down buttons.

The make pan shot button does nothing, that functionality is not yet implemented, only static shots for the moment.

To have a dialog trigger an action (give out rewards, start quests, whatever), check the "Action" checkbox and some further dialog elements will show up. The script itself does not define any actions, what it does is allow you to call a function on an object, where you can then script whatever you need. This makes it very flexible, allowing it to trigger any action whatsoever.

Everything else should be pretty much self-explanatory.

Download the package below.