ROLE
Gameplay & Dialogue Designer, Project Manager
GENRE
Dating Sim
CREATED
Fall 2023 for the TAGD Game Jam "Parasitic Relationship"
AWARDS
Best In Theme
DESCRIPTION
Once there was a parasite who fell for the most beautiful human. The parasite knew it would never work out... unless they took over someone else’s body, but not just anyone would do… This parasite’s crush deserved perfection. They deserved their dream partner! This little parasite would stop at nothing to give them that. Not even traumatizing innocent people by taking over their motor functions and not letting them speak.
PROCESS
On this project I got well acquainted with the time that it takes to build a complex dialogue tree. Even though I was only writing short statements for the NPCs and non-verbal responses for the player to choose between, the logic of the dialogue branching was a beast all on its own.
Each of the characters in Love Bug have 3 likes, 3 dislikes, and have an archetype as their name. In order to inspire character personalities that felt varied, my team came up with the archetypes (which double as the character names for now) first, and then I assigned likes and dislikes in a way that made the most sense, while also being evenly distributed. This resulted in unexpected combinations that the player might not suspect at first, while still being true to their archetype. I'll keep those a secret so you can find them for yourself!
Now that I had a cast of characters, I could start to design how they might interact. In the dialogue tree, three main factors guide how the conversation will go: previously earned chemistry, host traits (who the player is playing as), and player choice. This process was made so much smoother by the tool YarnSpinner. I could code dialogue intuitively and check against variables like chemistry and traits. I can’t imagine how much harder dialogue coding for Love Bug would have been without YarnSpinner.
