Back to Naar

Back to working on Naar properly now that the exam course has started.

I wrote this post as a note on what I did today but realized it worked great as a blogpost as well so i decided to get right back into the blog.

The game’s dialogue will be delivered using text boxes at the bottom of the screen with a profile picture of the character speaking. These boxes are changed to produce a chain of dialogue. This is a standard concept of delivering dialogue in text form. For the sake of consistency within the project and any other place it is mentioned I have chosed on name each of the dialogue pieces a Card. One dialogue contains several cards which are cycled through.

Each of these cards require a designated text and picture depending on what is being said by what character. I also added a boolean to determine if the profile picture should be on the left or right side of the screen to make it clearer when two characters are talking to each other.

These cutscenes (as they are referred to at the moment) are activated by a custom blueprint class containing a trigger box. This class takes multiple variables when placed in the world.

Repeatable: Whether the player replay the cutscene again after it ends.

Auto Advance: If the cutscene should advance on it’s own or by player pressing a button. This is interesting because it lets the same class be used both for in-game dialogue as well as actual cutscene dialogue, the latter meaning the player has no control over their character during it and therefore had time to advance the text manually.

Time Per Card: Only used if auto advancing cutscenes. The time between each card change in the cutscene. If the cutscene is to use individual times for separate cards this is to be set to -1.0.

Dialogue Cards: (I know i misspelled it) By making the process dynamic the class can handle any number of cards in this list. This makes it easier for anyone making cutscenes as they simply have to feed in the details for the dialogue cards. The variables in each dialogue card is fairly straightforward. Each card has a maximum of three lines to allow for the longest dialogues, in shorter ones they use the second line while the other two are left blank. Time is 1.0 by default and is only used for automatically advancing cutscenes. This may not be used depending on if we require individual length for individual cards in the same cutscene.

Finally, there is a possibility for adding sounds to the individual cards. While this certainly can be done I decided to hold off with it until we have a clearer idea of how we want dialogue audio to work. Full voice, a few clips per characters, one clip per character etc.

Next thing will be implementation of Harakat in it’s new form where the player will put in a button combination to perform a screen clearing attack.