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3D Dialogue Thing - An Initial Mockup

6 years ago3,429 words

Based on comments on the previous post and my internal reactions to them, I've decided that I'm going to spend my time working on a sort of interactive story rather than a game!

Thanks to those of you who did comment! It was nice to have got such a response, and it's always interesting when people mention games I made what feels to me like a lifetime ago.

I recently wrote a long post which I never actually posted (something that happens annoyingly often) where I described three possible projects I could spend my recovering-from-brain-surgery time on: a game of some sort, a new community website (which I've already made but isn't ready to be seen yet; I'll talk about that when it is), and a sort of interactive story similar to things I've attempted in the past, most notably ∞ Divine Dreams ∞. Some of you suggested that I do something which was essentially the third of those ideas, and reading those comments made me realise that's probably the direction I'd prefer to go in, at least for now.

I do enjoy making games, but it's definitely difficult and incredibly time-consuming, and designing a good 'game loop' which is consistently entertaining without being tedious despite repetition is especially challenging.

I also feel like I might have outgrown games, at least to some degree. Recently I've been trying to play Final Fantasy XV, finally. It came out a while ago, but I had to wait for a PC version because I don't have a PS4 or whatever it was on. And then when it did come out on PC, it took me months to actually get around to playing it. Now, I have to reluctantly almost force myself to play it, and only do so for a couple of hours every few days. I'm doing pretty much none of the sidequests. I feel I could or should be using my time on other things, and even when I'm playing it, I'm not particularly enjoying it. It's so different to how eagerly I'd immerse myself in game worlds when I was younger. I feel that this is probably quite a common thing, from what I've read elsewhere. I had more passion for making games when I had more desire to play them; it's only habit that made me want to return to it, really.

I do still want to tell some kind of story though, and I suppose what I have in mind is more like a webcomic than a game. People do have some interest in webcomics or similar things (though I wonder if they're mostly young people who do), though tons of people attempt to make them and only a tiny, tiny fraction actually make any money for their creators. I suppose the same could be said of games too, but it definitely seems that games have the potential to be culture-defining in a way that webcomics aren't. But then again, I wonder whether the reaction to Homestuck (a very atypical webcomic, if it could even be called that) and the one to Undertale weren't drastically different. It's not that I want or hope that anything I'll make will be big like that; I'm just very aware that I need to make money somehow, and it scares me that I might not have any way to do that without going out and getting some normal person job, which is horrifying to me with this ∞ broken mind ∞ that I have.

I'll worry about all that some other time, though. For now, I want to talk about some plans for the format of this thing, as well as some technical challenges and irritations that I've faced already while trying to make a prototype (which I have indeed made, and I'll link after I've described it a bit).

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Ideally, I want it to be something that people can access from their browser, since the harder it is to get at, the fewer people will bother to even look at it. I designed Divine Dreams with that in mind, and came up with this 2D thing with dialogue being shown sort of like a text chatroom conversation:



It worked, mostly, but it had all kinds of limitations that would have led to a lot of frustration in the long run. I didn't exactly enjoy drawing those 2D characters, and I didn't even bother drawing alternate emotes for them because I doubted my ability to do so and it felt like a chore. The characters were also quite distant from their words, meaning that as the reader you'd be unlikely to be looking at their faces, which created a kind of disconnect. And as some but not all of the messages were visible on screen, it led to the feeling that you should be able to scroll up to missed bits, ruining temporal immersion and creating frustration when you couldn't scroll at all. And of course every scene would just be the characters standing statically on either side of a screen like this, with an unmoving background. Not dynamic at all.

I've been getting more and more into 3D modelling lately, and I spend a lot of my time doing that these days. Mostly it's for a thing which I've talked about before, which is essentially this kind of thing but with some characters of mine talking about stuff I'd love to talk about with friends in person if I had any. Sad, but it's satisfying in some form to work on, and I devote probably more time to it than I should considering that I'm never going to show it to anyone, what with it being way too personal. I've learned a lot from working on it though, and I've tried to incorporate much of that into this.

Here's what it looks like so far:



It doesn't really have any plot or purpose at the moment; it's very much a mock-up, made in a few hours. I'm just using a model I made recently for a project that went nowhere; she doesn't even have a name, and this doesn't necessarily represent the visual look I'll be going for. I do have some ideas for a story, based on past ideas without repeating them exactly, but I've yet to settle on anything just yet.

When I looked back over ∞ Divine Dreams ∞, I felt that there are some things I still like, but I definitely cringed at some of the characterisation, especially that of Oneira. Her social anxiety is as severe as my own, so perhaps only those with ∞ Avoidant Personality Disorder ∞ would be able to relate to her at all, while others would find her irritating, or perplexing or something. I'm also unsure about the whole Soulmate/Ego thing, being personifications of her own mind.

∞ Embracing Eternity ∞ - where Fey explores the afterlife after committing suicide, guided by an angel - still interests me as a story, but it was designed as a game, so I'm unsure how well it'd translate over to a story you'd just witness. It's also got a clear beginning and end, whereas Divine Dreams establishes a setting that could be used for multiple different stories.

What I'm thinking about doing is merging the two in some way. Like perhaps some characters could be in the afterlife, but then there's the whole temple thing as well, and they establish contact between one another or something. I'm not sure. I'd like to scrap some characters and make some new ones who are essentially combinations of some others, like for example the protagonist might be a girl with Fey's noose hair, Oneira's colour scheme, and Gemma's speech patterns, who's relatably awkward but not completely crippled by pathological anxieties. I aim to do some design work so then I can come up with something I'll want to stick with, and which hopefully other people would want to read about, rather than just diving in and regretting it later. I'll draw on earlier works, and I'll probably post about it here asking for opinions before I get properly started. So your feedback will be valuable if I do!

I'm unsure about the look to go for, also. I've been looking at a lot of other artists' 3D models on a site called Sketchfab for inspiration, and I've found a lot that I'd like. I really like this highly stylised look, for example in things like ∞ this ∞, ∞ this ∞, ∞ this ∞, or ∞ this ∞. But as lovely as that kind of look looks, I'm unsure whether it's something I'd be capable of myself. Some artists just end up with styles like that naturally, in both 2D and 3D art, but I've never been one of them, so trying to adopt a style like that might never feel right or produce fluent-looking results. I feel that artists like that have art as their 'primary skill', which they've refined all their life and enjoyed doing so, whereas art skills come less naturally to me and my art looks sloppy by comparison... hmm.
So I don't know what I'd be able to achieve. I'd rather end up with something like ∞ this ∞ than ∞ this ∞, though. The latter could be said to be 'better' because it's more realistic, but that's not the kind of style I'd be aiming for at all. Even if I were capable of it, it wouldn't suit the kind of conversations the characters will be having.

In what I've got currently, the only interaction is clicking the screen to move through the conversation. If I stuck with that, I'd add new 'scenes' regularly, and you'd just progress through them entirely linearly. It'd be very much like a webcomic, but something I dislike about webcomics is that a single scene or conversation can stretch out over weeks or even months, with each page only having like two or three sentences or something. So in this, each update would include a longish conversation in its entirety. Maybe there'd be appeal in that.

Alternatively, I could make something where you can run around and talk to various characters, with each update changing what people say, and what happens when you talk to them. Very much like the walkaround parts of Homestuck, for those of you familiar with that. It'd be more interactive, but much more difficult to make, especially as I wouldn't be able to handle things as linearly. As exciting as choice always is to the player/viewer/reader/whatever, it's a pain in the bum when you're the one trying to write the story.

I want to make something 3D like this because I'm enjoying working with 3D, and I feel it's a lot more immersive than just static images, such that people might become attached to and invested in the characters more quickly. It can take hours to draw several panels with varied body language, but it's relatively trivial to reuse face and body expressions in 3D to convey just as much emotion. I also like having some form of interaction, even if it's just clicking through dialogue, as that makes you feel marginally less like a passive watcher.

I imagine that this kind of thing has been done by someone, somewhere, but I can't think of examples that have done it exactly as I intend to. Machinima as a genre comes to mind, but that's not something I've ever personally been into or seen much of, and from what I gather, it typically takes the form of videos with voice acted dialogue? While making videos for YouTube would be more accessible than making some 3D thing for browsers, I can't exactly do voice acting (especially for multiple characters, including female ones), and watching through written dialogue at a pace that doesn't match your reading speed might just be irritating. I wonder if I could make video versions of scenes in addition, though. But I can imagine complaints if they lack voice acting.

Now that I've rambled about this for far too long, I'll link to some prototypes that you can try out, if you so desire.

∞ Here's a web player version ∞.

∞ Here's (a zip file containing) an exe version that you can download. ∞

It is of a completely sensible and I hope deeply moving exchange between these two well-thought-out 4-dimensional characters. A beautiful, beautiful work of pure art for sure.

There's music (from ∞ this post ∞), which you can mute or unmute by pressing M.

Poses are static at the moment, but would be animated eventually.

Neither of those versions work on mobiles yet (I think the former might technically 'work', but definitely not as intended), but I want to look into that. There are various technical hurdles that I've already encountered though, and I want to ramble a bit about those now for those who might be interested.



I always like seeing wireframes of models made by other people - I've learned a lot from viewing others' models in this way - so I wanted to include some of this character here. It's a fairly simple model, and I don't even know if I'll use anything like it in what this thing might eventually become, but I feel it turned out quite elegantly in terms of ∞ topology ∞, at least for someone self-taught and relatively inexperienced like me.







Her 'clothes' are just coloured contours of the base body, because I wanted to get that right before making any actual clothing. There are a bunch of little but frustrating issues getting the weight painting just right... which I was going to rant about, but I suppose it's too technical to be interesting to people who don't even know what weight painting is! Getting the shoulders just right for a variety of poses without complicating the armature is a huge pain though. Ugh.

The model uses a modified version of ∞ the deliberately simple rig I made for Fey ∞; the face rig in particular is essentially the same.



For expressions, the eyebrows, eyes, and the mouth each have a number of different states which can be combined to create a whole lot of varied faces. Normally I'd make each expression (eyebrows + eyes + mouth positions) its own entity, so I was quite pleased when I suddenly decided to do it this way instead! They're written in the 'code' that turns into dialogue as simple two-or-three-character strings, shown at the bottom of each of the following examples. I'm quite pleased with that, as it allows me to write dialogue with accompanying expressions quickly and easily.



These facial feature states were made quickly, and as such are passable but not great (they don't feel exactly as I'd want them to); I'd tweak them on a model I intended to actually properly use.

Annoyingly, I'm having some discrepancies between the poses/animations in Blender (my modelling program) and Unity. It's really subtle, but it bothers me a lot because of perfectionism, I suppose. For example:



Here's a (really rather obnoxious) facial expression; the left is Unity, the right is Blender. The overall shape and size of the head is different because Unity is using perspective here but Blender isn't (and it's interesting how much of a difference that makes; I could write a whole post about what I've learned about all this). But can you see the difference between the mouth and the eyebrows? They're more 'jagged' in Unity, and it seems to be due to the bones used in the face rig not exporting or importing precisely, or maybe it's a vertex weight thing, or something else, I don't know. It's really subtle, but subtle differences in facial expressions make a big difference to how they're perceived, so it bothers me.

(It also seems to be affecting the eyelashes, so they look ugly when she shuts her eyes.)

Another point of irritation is exporting the thing in a format that can play in browsers. It's technically possible for Unity to export to something called WebGL, for browsers, but it's annoyingly limited compared to the standalone player. For example, compare these three screenshots:







These are different kinds of lighting modes. The first is Unlit, meaning that there's no lighting at all, and the textures are unmodified. Low poly models often seem to be displayed this way (as seen in some of the examples I linked to earlier), and have shading painted directly onto their textures (this model doesn't have that; it'd look less flat if I did), so it's not completely objectionable. The second screenshot is something Unity calls Gamma lighting mode, which is its default, and the third is what it calls Linear lighting mode. I don't know if you can see much of a significant difference, but personally I think Gamma mode looks 'dirty' or cheap or something, like mediocre cutscenes from old PlayStation games, whereas Linear looks more vibrant, alive, and modern. It's got something to do with how the way our eyes perceive gradients is more accurately captured by Linear mode, or something, from what little I read.

The problem is that the WebGL player of Unity doesn't support Linear lighting mode... at least not widely. Something called WebGL 2.0 does support it, but few browsers support that (only Chrome does, from what I gather?). This means that I'd be stuck with either Unlit or Gamma lighting modes, neither of which is how I'd ideally like the thing to look. So that's annoying. In the versions I linked to earlier, the exe uses Linear, the browser one uses Gamma.

The browser version also looks more pixelated to me, and I don't know why that is. I've not looked into it yet.

A huge issue though is that it doesn't really work on mobile browsers at all, which has been making me rethink what program to make this in. I've read that some other programs can create results that are widely supported across different browsers, including mobile ones, but such programs seem less established than Unity, more likely to just become defunct perhaps, which would be a big issue if I decided to stick with this for a few years. I'd also have to learn to use something new, which might not have the same functionality as Unity.

I'm also having a weird issue in the web player and standalone versions where the text bubbles are losing their rounded corners, though I only started work on this a day ago so that's probably something I can fix somehow.



I know this is a long and all over the place and I've not exactly presented much of a story that you could have much of an opinion about yet, but I am as always curious to hear whether telling a story in this kind of format is of any interest to you at all! I'll post specifically about what the story itself might be about at some other time; for now I'm just trying to sort out the technicalities of the medium, to see if it's even feasible or not.

I often felt that I made my games around the dialogue and music; all the rest of the stuff like mechanics etc was just a container for those things. I don't know whether something this stripped-down would find a place in people's hearts like MARDEK apparently did, but it might be quite satisfying for me to make once I've figured out a way to actually make it.