Personal Project | Tools Used: Pen and Paper
Dodo Airlines - Stuck in a Loop
Animal Crossing: New Horizons is, by design, slow. To ignore that would be to pretend that most of the design choices of AC:NH are not purposefully slow design, but rather bad design foisted upon players out of ignorance. If the latter is, in fact the case, that’d be a shame. But for the sake of my sanity, I’m choosing to believe that the Dodo Airlines Dialogue options with Orville the receptionist can one day change down the road to help make things more purposefully slow, and less seemingly dragging.
This small project purely focused on retooling one branch of Orville’s dialogue tree, as the changes I propose are applicable to all his dialogue branches, anyway. Given that the purpose of this was to create less repetition, visualizing the same changes across all his dialogue trees would be a bit too ironic.Goals
1) Retool Orville’s dialogue to be more forgiving of mis-presses, incorrect inputs, and fumbled Dodo Codes.
Identifying Problems
The first thing, as with any design project, is validating that there’s a problem here to begin with. As much as Orville’s tedious dialogue loop grated on my sanity, I had to make sure that I wasn’t the only one bothered by it. (Un)fortunately, it seems I’m not the only one who wants Orville to stop repeating himself. I found countless a number of memes bemoaning the length of the conversation (among other issues), and a propose multi-option menu rework to pare down on all the dialogue bubbles.
Restructuring a Scripted Conversation
As I started thinking about how to restructure the Orville conversation, I realized I was rounding out two different approaches in mind to help with this repetitive dialogue. While both options preserve all the existing dialogue, each option cuts down on the amount of times a player would have to go through certain dialogue sections due to incorrect inputs or dialogue choices.
(a) Backtrack
The Backtrack conversation flow was the first option I thought of, and it’s a method that’s not uncommon to other games. Simply put, selecting the “STOP” option to the dialogue would no longer cancel the entire dialogue track, but instead bring the player one dialogue choice backwards in the dialogue tree. The downside is that this drastically increases the number of actions a player would have to make in order to fully exit the conversation with Orville.
(b) Checkpoints
The Checkpoint system is essentially an autosave system in a game—or in this case, a conversation. Selecting the bottom option in the dialogue would “quit” the current conversation, and load the most recent autosave point. In this dialogue branch, the nearest checkpoint is, at this point, when the player made the decision to leave their island, bringing them back to that initial decision point in the interaction.
Lessons Learned & Future Plans
This was my first time modifying dialogue script. It’s not something I was familiar with, and I soon realized it could very quickly turn into an overwhelming amount of flow charts to keep track of each and every dialogue option and it’s resulting branch. Creating a conversation that resembles something organic is no easy task, and I would like to imagine that this was at least a decent first try at it.
Looking back at this down the road, a while after first fleshing it out, I realize that this wasn’t exactly an elegant or optimized flow that I had drawn up. Though I can see where I was going with it, the implementation is a bit clunky. I was hesitant to retool and add even more dialogue options, due to the initial goal of cleaning up the interaction with Orville, but I now realize that it might not be possible to optimize this conversation without rebuilding a relatively large part of it. By tying the last option in each dialogue to either the previous state, or a checkpoint location, the player loses the ability to leave the entire conversation in one button press, if they realized that they changed their mind mid-conversation and wanted to stay on their island for a bit longer.
