Calliope-d: An Authoring Environment for Interactive Dialog

Abstract

Creating an interactive dialog for a video game is a complex task. Unlike in non-interactive media, the requirements on a game dialog are unique in many ways and writers have to reinterpret their role in almost every project. This not only addresses the artistic challenge of writing high quality dialog lines, but also the preservation of consistency throughout every possible path, the co-ordination with the game s pace, and its technical integration into a game engine. Surprisingly, there is only little professional tool support for game writers so far. In this paper, we introduce the authoring tool Calliope-d for the creation of interactive dialog. It builds upon a series of interviews with professional game writers. The main feature of the prototype is the separation of the complex structure of an interactive dialog and its actual content. We will show the benefits of this approach and how the software design allows for an arbitrary creation of abstractions, even for the integration of dialog in game engines.