The Display

Figure 23.4 shows what the display looked like.

23.4. Siboot display.

graphics/23fig04.gif

There are five panes in this window. The pane in the lower right shows you, in the iconic language, what your interlocutor has just said. That sentence is this: "Wiki greets Vetvel pleasantly." Wiki is the dark-faced fellow in the upper left of the pane; Vetvel is the horny character. You play the role of Vetvel.

The pane in the lower center shows you Wiki's state of mind. The three bars show you his three mental attributes, tanaga, katsin, and shial, roughly corresponding to fear, affection, and trust. During the course of a conversation, you can see how these values change in response to your actions. The face underneath is an interesting solution to a resource problem. There are eight characters in the game and each character can show nearly a dozen faces. That would require nearly a hundred separate drawings. There simply wasn't space available for so much graphics. Instead, I opted for a generic face showing only the most critical elements of the face. Like a happy face, this generic face can be applied to anybody.

The pane in the upper center shows you the date, time, your location (Wiki's house) and the other person present (Wiki). It also presents the editing commands for the sentence you are preparing to say, which, in this case, is BackSpace. The sentence that you are building appears in the upper-right pane. It's the most complex form of sentence available in Siboot; it says "Vetvel offers to tell Wiki the amount of Gardbore's katsin if in return Wiki tells Vetvel…" The sentence is unfinished. You the player must fill in the name of the character about whom you wish information. The available characters are shown in the left pane; you simply click on the icon to insert it into the sentence.



Chris Crawford on Game Design
Chris Crawford on Game Design
ISBN: 0131460994
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 248

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