Dialogue System - 3/17 to 3/23

For the first time in the game, you can now talk to people instead of just shooting at them. ☮️

The first thing to do was to find some portrait art, which proved to be a bit of a tougher task than I thought it would be. Actually that's proving to be a common theme so far with this game. 2D art available on most asset stores seems like it tends to either fit mideval fantasy or casual mobile in it's style. I wasn't able in the end to find torso-up-portraits in a scifi or modern day style, so I eventually settled on this pack which provided at least some variations and wasn't deeply locked into any one style. The only issue was it didn't include the torso so I popped into paint and threw together some quick (bad) torso art.

Then I took the art and combined it with VIDE, which I mentioned last week, to form dialogue trees. The goal with these trees will be to try to keep them self contained and have many many small trees rather than a few very deep trees.

Once the decisions had been made on the art and tree structure, the next thing to do was to make a front end UI that could read and traverse the trees. Just like everything else in the game I am designing it so that it can be controled from keyboard/mouse, controller, or touch. Here it's showing PS4 controls but they're referenced in code in such a way that I can swap out the icon's without much trouble in the future.

My goal for the coming week is to start working on an inventory system, and provided that goes well, start on a shop system that will leverage the dialogue system built this week.