We’ve made a great deal of progress in making our systems for storytelling in the game. We’ve built an entire visual novel system to be used for conveying dialog to our players. This system will be combined with the puppets we have been creating through Spine to create a system we believe will be visually appealing for players as they play through our game’s story.
Through our tools we have created an interconnected system of ids that we can use to create and refer to specific events and NPCs in the game. Through Photoshop we are able to pinpoint locations and paths for NPCs in the game, then refer to the story events they are capable of activating in the game. This even allows us to branch our story choices by selecting event IDs to dynamically load new story events during dialog runtime.
We’ve created a simple nine slice system to display our dialog box that allows us to scale any frames in the game to an infinite size without losing quality or causing stretching. This is accomplished by splitting frames into 9 “slices”, which allows us to instead of stretching the edges of our box to instead repeat the slice as necessary until it is the size we would like it to be.
We are excited to share more of our game systems and aesthetic as development continues. Please follow us on Twitter to get updates on when our next devlog goes up, and leave us a comment on what you think of how our new dialog system looks! Next week a new member of the TerraZone club will be stopping in for a visit.