Deep Dive: Creating seamless dialogue for narrative poker game Sunshine Shuffle
Game Developer Deep Dives are an ongoing series with the goal of shedding light on specific design, art, or technical features within a video game in order to show how seemingly simple, fundamental design decisions aren’t really that simple at all.
Earlier installments cover topics such as how solo developed Devon Wiersma optimized the spraypainted world of Bombing!! 2: A Graffiti Paradise, the updated visuals and production pipeline of Ravenlok, and how the team behind the genre-bending God of Rock blended fighting and rhythm games into one cohesive style.
In this edition, Strange Scaffold developer Stav Hinezon breaks down the narrative design structure of Sunshine Shuffle.
Hello! I’m Stav Hinenzon, a game designer and developer based in the northwestern US. I worked as a freelance programmer on indie studio Strange Scaffold’s new game Sunshine Shuffle, which launched on May 24. In Sunshine Shuffle, players sit down to play a friendly game of poker with a group of animals ready to finally tell the story of how they robbed a bank twenty years ago. Like the game’s primary inspiration, Telltale’s Poker Night at the Inventory, the game and the conversation occur simultaneously. This created some interesting constraints for the game’s narrative tools and systems. In this article, I’ll get into how the game’s dialogue system was designed to meet those constraints and create the experience of seamless conversation.
Like Poker Night at the Inventory, Sunshine Shuffle aims to create the feeling of sharing a space with a group of fictional characters by centering gameplay on an activity shared by the player and the characters and then never interrupting the space of that activity. Once the player gets past the main menu, the
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