Fifteen conversations

Obviously, the big thing with this episode is handling the 15 conversations in the game. I am using the term conversation loosely as really each character only says one thing. Reading their comments will give you a good idea of what is really going on, which is one of the benefits of gossip (though gossip in the real world can also gives you a lot of false information). There are all sorts of ways of handling having 15 different conversations.

The easiest way would be to simply set up a frame for each of the conversations and go to that frame when the player started talking to that particular character. This has the added advantage that the characters would be fully customizable so every character in the game would look different. The disadvantage would be that art would be needed for all fourteen characters. Having all the different character links also is a bit messy.

What I probably should have done, but didn't, would be to have the conversation bubble appear within the maze. This is actually fairly easy to do. I, for some reason I can't remember now, wanted a closeup when the character was talking to the player.

The solution I decided to go with was to have generic characters. This allowed the closeup, and only required two faces (four if you count the boss and Nancy). The hair colors were changed to give the appearance of more characters than there are.