Dialogue management for social game characters using statecharts

Character development in games tend to refer to those features that augment the character's skills and experiences in order for it to become better equipped to meet the challenges in the game. We mean that the next step should be to provide the characters with social skills, including the ability to interact using natural language. To date an extensive amount of significant work has been done in the field of believable characters, but not specifically aimed at being placed in game worlds. This means that the methods used not necessarily meet the necessary requirements. In this paper we present a method we believe is capable of handling both game flow as well as dialogue flow, namely statecharts. By example we also show how to specify statecharts for describing socially intelligent dialogue behavior.