How Does Dialogue Get Into Games? Double Fine Explains at GDC In August

Have you ever wondered how dialogue leaps from lines in a word document to being fully realized in a game? Brutal Legend and Psychonauts developer Double Fine will explain what it entails during a talk at GDC Europe this summer, event organizers have announced.

Double Fine senior gameplay programmer Anna Kipnis will give a talk at GDC Europe in August titled "Dialog Systems in Double Fine Games" where she'll provide an overview of how dialogue makes its way into a Double Fine game. She'll start from the moment a line is written to hearing and seeing the line in-engine, and even in a foreign language.

The overall goal of the presentation is to identify the obstacles developers face when implementing dialogue in games, and offer up ideas for how to overcome them. "Attendees will get an in-depth overview of Double Fine's approach to design and development with fully-voiced characters, the tools our writers and implementers use, how we track the lines, what dialog systems need to be written to play the dialog in the game, how to approach writing dynamic dialog systems, and how to make sure that the game can be translated into another language without much overhead," reads a line from the description of the lecture posted on the GDC website.

Event organizers also announced another new presentation called "Emergent Stories in Crusader Kings II." Presented by Paradox game director Henrik Fahraeus, the lecture will go into depth about what exactly it means for a game to offer "emergent gameplay" and how that can affect overall replayability.

GDC Europe takes place August 11-13 in Cologne, Germany. Immediately following GDC Europe and also in Cologne is this year's Gamescom, expected to be one of the biggest consumer video game trade shows of the year.