Week 9 — Oct 20 — Ex 6: Story in the World

Exercise: Ex 6 — Story in the World. A room that tells a story through props and three triggered text beats — no dialogue tree, no branching, just staged environmental reveals.

Track note: for the Narrative track, this exercise is the primary design artifact for the semester, per the syllabus — everyone builds it, but Narrative-track students should be pushed to treat it as a real prototype of their game's opening room rather than a disposable exercise.

Lecture topics, expanded

DialogueTrigger and staged text beats. The helper library's DialogueTrigger displays a sequence of text beats on trigger enter — no branching logic, just an ordered array of strings shown one after another. The design lesson is sequencing: three beats in the wrong order tell a worse story than one beat in the right place, so the exercise rewards editing the order as much as the content.

Trigger volumes for environmental storytelling. Reusing TriggerZone from Ex 3/Ex 5, but for narrative rather than mechanical purposes — a volume around an overturned chair, a bloodstain, a locked door the player can't yet open. The teaching point: a prop tells a story through placement and condition, not through a label; a trigger just decides when the player is close enough to notice.

Timeline for sequenced reveals. Unity's Timeline lets a trigger kick off more than a text box — a light flickering on, a door creaking open, a camera dolly toward a detail. It's the first place students combine several systems (audio, animation, camera) under one timed sequence rather than wiring them as separate one-off events.

Connecting it forward

There's no milestone this week, but Ex 6 is a soft rehearsal for the Screen Layout milestone's win/lose states two weeks out — a game that ends on a text beat instead of a plain "You Win" screen reads as considerably more finished, and costs almost nothing extra once DialogueTrigger is already in the project. Worth flagging to students building anything narrative-adjacent (Anabasis-style branching, Detective Liz-style clue reveals, or just an ending they want to land).