Originally, TRISTOY was planned to be a visual novel. What may seem irritating at first, becomes more apparent if we follow the story of the story.
Like said above, the idea was to create a visual novel, where player choices matter and influence the way of the story. So over time, we realized, that creating a complex and branching story is not an easy task. (TRISTOY has around 20k words of dialogue which are all connected!)
So our goal was really to get away from the linear and (somewhat boring) storytelling, where there is a simple (This text follows this text) way of story. So we really wanted to make this more interesting by giving the players the power to choose what they wanted to say or how they wanted to behave. (Which is heavily influenced by the awesome classic pen & paper games where characters “play” their role like they want, which is “Role Play” in its purest form.)
Following that lead, it became clear, that we needed to develop our own tools, to make it possible to have complex branching dialogues between characters (And between the players!) where there are possibilities of checking what has happened before.
So we set out and created our most valuable in-house dialogue editor, the Dialogue-Master:
In the screenshot, you can see a part of the dialogue between both characters and the imprisoned princess Kaya. The blue lines belong to the magician Stayn, the orange ones to Prince Freedan. Purple ones are those of Princess Kaya. It’s up to the characters, if they help her or kill her.
After we had developed the dialogue master, we were happy that we could easily develop complex dialogues, which are tightly integrated with the game. So that’s the story of the story of TRISTOY, full of bizarre characters, tough choices and, well, friendship.