Week 2 - Conversations and Cutscenes

This week has been all about getting the conversation system set up. 

I'd initially planned to have these in-level using the 3D models, but talking to my classmates the feedback was that the 2D characters are so characterful and it'd be worthwhile using them for the conversation scenes. To be honest, that makes life a lot easier for me! 

So I've set up these cutscenes and conversations as separate scenes in Unity. This allowed me to work on them as self-contained things, which was useful, but I did have an issue with data permanence as I loaded between scenes - for example, the player was resetting to their start point after ending a conversation. I used Player Preferences to manage this, but it can be a bit iffy and I think I need to have another look at the timing of my code...

I've been following dialogue system tutorials online, but none of them account for two different speakers with different dialogue box locations etc. in one queue of conversation - it's been a fun task adapting the code to fit with the visuals that I want to achieve. The video below is a WIP, I've since managed to get it working cleanly and smoothly and I'm pretty pleased with it! The writing for the intro, outro, and first quests are complete and I've set up dialogue scenes for all of these. It definitely feels like a real game is coming together.

I decided I wouldn't worry about voice acting, but to add a bit of flavour to the dialogue, I cracked out the old ukulele and recorded some gentle plinkling. It's subtle, but I set it up so that the player speaks in a major key while the NPCs speak in a minor key - hopefully giving the feeling of warmth and optimism that the player is bringing to them!

Photo by the inestimable Oli Facey - https://gallery.oliverfacey.co.uk/

I've also added pop-up UI elements for smaller lines of dialogue within the main 3D scene, and begun work on the quest status system which registers whether you've spoken to the NPC before, whether you've completed the quest, etc. I'm still on track with the action plan, which is a good sign. The next week will be fleshing this out, adding item interactions and inventory, and finalising the first quest!