Week 10: Who, Where, When

Hello, and welcome back. This week I will be talking about the character system. As of my current progress, I have finished connecting all of the scenes together, as well as incorporating all of the dialogue and characters. I will be discussing this along with my plans for next week.

Active characters and backgrounds

As I mentioned in the previous post, one of the sections in the lines of dialogue is commands. Using this, I can read commands directly from the dialogue file and match those to existing commands within my script to set the active characters and backgrounds.

Dialogue boxes

Another small feature within the dialogue system that I added was separate name and text boxes. Adjusting some of the code, I can hide the name box if the narrator is talking or show the name box when a character is talking.

Following along

Another thing I worked on this week was a target tracking system for my enemy. When the main character comes within its detection range it should start moving towards them and attack. Once the main character moves out of the detection range, the enemy should go back to normal.

Play-Testing

This week, I managed to get some people to play-test our game. Although the combat system is still in progress, I was able to get some suggestions on character sizing, lighting, and the appearance of the UI. Moving into next week, the game should be fully ready for play-testing!

The Final Stretch

As we go into the final week of this operation, I will be finishing up the enemy as well as fine-tuning the appearance of the dialogue scene. Thanks for reading, see you next week!

References

I used these videos from Stellar Studio to understand how to create a dialogue system.

“Make a Visual Novel in Unity 2023.” Youtube, uploaded by Stellar Studio, 27 Jan. 2023, youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGSox0FgA5B58Ki4t4VqAPDycEpmkBd0i&si=eN64qJUApQ61-4rc.