Dialogue Planning - 3/11 to 3/16 - My Week In GameDev

This week was a bit of a weird one to write a blog post for as absolutely no features got implemented or even made progress towards being made. Instead I tried out a bunch of art assets, dev assets, and paper prototypes trying to figure out how I'm going to go forward with the dialogue system.

I knew from early on that this was one system I didn't want to code myself. Dialogue systems are so standard and so common that it would be pointless to spend a bunch of time building a platform for doing this work. After looking through a number of options I ultimately decided to use VIDE Dialogues on the Unity Asset Store as it is a very solid implementation and more importantly makes zero assumptions about the front end that will be using it. After going through all of it's example scenes/front-ends I'm fairly convinced that it'll work for any situation I can throw at it without forcing me to bend for it.

As a nice bonus, it has built in support for localization or can even use an outside system like L2 for localization.

With a dialogue system picked the next step was to design how the front end flow would be. I originally made a bunch of mockups in the modern Bioware style due to really enjoying Bioware's implementation, but after staring at it long enough decided I wanted something more classic and list like. From here I decided to take inspiration instead from Persona 4 as I felt like it's implementation was very straightforward and clean.

After storyboarding out the flow I'm convinced that this is the way I'm going to go. Now in the coming week I'll be working on implementing the system so that the game can start to have some neat dialogue.