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Dialogue Scenes & Dioramas

1 year ago1,294 words

Some thoughts about how battles should probably begin with silly narrative scenes, and how maybe area rooms could look like isolated dioramas...

Urgh, productivity's been terrible all week due to focus issues as a result of mental health issues combined with distracting/annoying 'life stuff' and general indecisiveness about what to do with this still-unnamed side project thing.

(I should probably devote some time to trying to finally decide on a title!! Or maybe one will come to me as what the game even is becomes clearer.)



∞ I wrote a post a couple of days ago ∞ about something I was uncertain about, which was whether to allow the player to form a party of six archetypes they'd collect (or five plus the player character), or - due to issues with that - whether they'd have one or two fixed allies instead.

I've been wrestling with that a fair bit, and while it feels like some terrible tragedy to lose the archetype-collecting aspect because I love it conceptually, having just one fixed ally (from a small number of specific characters I'd design) should make for more challenging and fulfilling gameplay and greater narrative potential.

So that's what I'll likely do.

I intended to spend today incorporating the necessary changes, though I got caught on a snag almost immediately: how exactly - in a technical sense - would the player acquire these allies? It'd need to be different to the current system, where everyone you tamed joins you at the end of battle.

Currently, battles start when you talk to an NPC in a room, which makes all the NPCs say a single line of dialogue in succession:



After this, the characters all run into the middle of the area, the camera zooms in, and battle begins, as you can see in this short video (from a previous post):



In the original Belief, though (as you can see in this old video yet again),



talking to an NPC starts a conversation like the ones in Atonal Dreams, where character models appear floating above the scene at the bottom of the screen and they emote while delivering lines.

I like those scenes, and feel that adding short, similar things would be more entertaining than just having all the NPCs in the room say a single line via a popup with just their face (especially since those appear in an order determined on who you interacted with and the others' distance from you, so I couldn't write them in a way that properly related to the others; for example, if one said "I like stoats" and teh other said "I don't", you could get them in the reverse order).

So I was wondering whether instead, when you talk to an NPC, everyone runs to their battle positions and the camera changes, but instead of the battle UI appearing, the characters go through some (brief) written conversation like the ones in that old Belief demo, then the battle would begin.

It'd mean the models could emote in response to other speakers without creating duplicates floating above the scene. For me at least, a lot of the charm of the scenes in that video comes from the non-speakers' expressions changing slightly, which obviously isn't possible if all you can see is a single face in a dialogue box.

I could still use the single-face dialogue boxes for after-battle remarks. Maybe before running back to their original positions, characters would make these remarks, and they'd say they exact same thing if you talked to them again on the map.

Battles beginning and ending with dialogue like this would allow for more narrative potential, and for some coded events to fire like a certain person joining the party, or acquiring or requiring an item for the battle to begin or something.



Something else that's been bothering me is exactly how the areas are laid out.

They're organised as a grid of rooms, and the camera fixes on the current room, shifting only when you change rooms. Atonal Dreams works the same way. I like this, and have no intention of changing it.



For much of the testing process, I've been building temporary areas where each room is a blob of an island connected to adjacent ones via relatively narrow land bridges. I quite liked the look of this.

But when trying to make some hub areas based around the elements, I thought I should make islands where only the edge rooms had sea and beaches, and inner rooms were fully connected with land on all sides.




Something about it just felt so... I don't even know, empty? Unsatsifying, for some reason? Because there's too much open space and not enough decorative objects like rocks and plants? I don't know.

It's strange, because I built the areas of Atonal Dreams the same way, and never had similar feelings about them during any stage of their completion. Maybe it's just a result of recent low moods or something?

Either way, I got thinking about a concept I experimented with back when I was starting on what was then called Divine Dreams, which I wrote about in ∞ this post from January 2020 ∞:




Diorama areas, where only the current room is your whole focus, and others disappear from view.

While I scrapped the idea as development of that went on (and it turned into Atonal Dreams), I find myself going back to it fairly often with a kind of wistful longing that's pretty much identical to how I feel when I look back at the original Belief. "I wish I'd done something finished with that!" So incorporating it into this thing - which is essentially making the Belief concept into a finished game - would be quite fitting!

Plus it'd address some other technical issues I've been experiencing due to the zoom in for battles (rather than switching to a separate arena). Like if there are trees towards the back in an area south of the current one, they can block your view, if that makes any sense (actually, you can see a less extreme example of it in the first image in this post).



Something like that, though this is just a mock-up. I like the thought of adding rocks, seaweed, fish, skeletons of pirates, etc littering the inaccessible seafloor.

I was hoping to actually implement it - it shouldn't take long - but... bleh. Motivation issues.



Hopefully I'll be able to rest over the weekend and get back to things feeling refreshed on Monday. Hopefully.

I still haven't heard back about counselling, by the way, so I contacted a second counselling service - the one I had years ago - to see if I'd have any luck there. I used email, and got a response telling me to call a number of some associated service/organisation/whatever that runs the counselling through them (or vice versa; I don't know how all the bureaucracy works), which they badly misspelled the name of. Promising.

Maybe I'll try to push through the CRIPPLING ANXIETY!!! I have about making phone calls and ring them next week... though the reason I didn't try this one in the first place was because I think they've moved locations and it's inconveniently far away now. Hmm.