Designing the Dialogue boss

After paragraph boss, punctuation was already in the game. You typed sentences, periods and commas included. The rhythm was different from regular rounds. I liked that. I wanted to go further with it.

#Where it came from

I was reading a comic and started noticing the speech bubbles. Each one is short, punchy, full of punctuation. Ellipses, exclamation points, mid-sentence question marks. The punctuation does a lot of the communicating.

I started thinking about what it would feel like to type that. Paragraph boss already had punctuation, but those were full prose sentences. Speech bubbles are shorter. The sentences don’t flow the same way. More punctuation, less warning about where it shows up.

#What the boss does

Each exchange is a short line. The boss talks. You type back what it said.

What makes it hard isn’t the words. It’s the punctuation. You know where the letters are. The punctuation keys are a different story. A period at the end of a sentence is something your eye skips when you’re reading. When you have to type it, the pinky has to go find it.

I wanted each encounter to have its own theme, and for the lines to actually fit that theme. A character who speaks in commands ends sentences differently than one who speaks in questions. When the speech fits the character, the punctuation follows a consistent pattern, and that pattern is something you can get into a rhythm with.

It’s the one boss where the content of what you’re typing is part of the design. The other bosses could use any words. Dialogue needs lines that fit the character saying them.