Seams - Week 2

Hello again and welcome back to my weekly blog about the game I'm working on with my team, Project PsychWard. A fair bit has happened already and I would like to look back at it a bit more reflectively than I might've done last week.

Team/Project Changes

Firstly, we had someone new join the team as our 10th member and as the 2nd programmer, meaning that as of now I am no longer working as the sole programmer for the game and will now need to organise and divide programming tasks between myself and the new team member. In the near future we will also need to spend time setting up something like a GitHub repository for the game to allow for a better collaborative workflow between myself, the other programmer and possibly designers too.

Something else that was also started this week was our team's introduction to Trello, a website for creating lists that we can use for project management in the style of the Kanban framework. Once we got the project workspace up and running everyone added an assortment of different tasks onto it and organised them based on which section of the team will be doing each task.

(How our Trello workspace is looking at the moment)

One thing I am concerned about is with how often the tasks will be updated. I have no doubt that I will update my own tasks as I work on them but I can't say for certain that everyone else on the team will make sure to update theirs on time. Time will tell in that regard though.

In other news, the team has somewhat decided on a name for the game. The general process of how this was done was by having everyone share an idea, discuss them a bit until we had two names left that we really liked and voted between which one we wanted to use. In the end, we decided on the name 'SEAMS' though we also considered this a working title still so at any point the name could still change. With that said and for the sake of consistency on this site, I will still be referring to the game as 'Project PsychWard' until a final name is properly decided.

Lastly, we discussed more about the game itself. We came up with new ideas that we wanted to implement into the game as well as changes to some of our plans from last week. As it stands right now, the game is now going to be more of a side-scrolling game at a slight camera angle (though it will still have a pixel art style). A new mini-game that takes place in an air vent will have a top-down perspective and finally, the day/night cycle that was discussed briefly last week was given some more focus and we decided that it would be more of a scripted mechanic that is fueled by progression.

Progress this week

This week I was assigned with the task of creating a dialogue system for the game. That is, a system that can store dialogue, display it with a fancy typing animation, and then step through any additional dialogue that comes after it. I purposefully set myself this assignment primarily due to the fact that I have done this exact sort of thing several times now for previous projects (look at the 'projects' sections of my website for those) and I figured that I could model the system after the one found in those past projects, which I promptly did. The results so far look pretty good.

To explain how the system works, Designers can create an object in Unity that holds the data for the dialogue itself, the name of the character speaking in that piece of dialogue, a sprite for the character currently speaking if necessary, a character voice (which is just an audio clip that plays when each letter is typed out) and additional data for unity events.

(An example of what one of those objects may store)

With the dialogue object there, an additional activator script is used on the object that you would want to trigger the dialogue and then the data is sent to a UI script to be displayed to the player in-game

(The dialogue script components)

There were some things in regards to the input system that I had struggles with when making the dialogue system, at the moment the controls for it are partially hard-coded (with the initial interaction bind being part of the input system but continuing through dialogue being baked in to the code, have a look to get a better understanding of what I mean below).

This works for now but in the future I'll want to change this, especially if changeable controls become part of the specification.

Despite all that, dialogue now works and I think it looks pretty alright, in the clip below I demonstrate the dialogue typing effect and changing names. Keep in mind that UI assets haven't been created yet so everything here is a work in progress:

I will admit that there were some shortcomings with this system initially. When I first made this system in previous projects, there was no support for names, voices and regular dialogue events and to an extent, the latter is still not properly implemented. I hadn't looked into how UnityEvents work much in the past so this week I've had to do a lot of reading and experimenting into how I'm actually supposed to use them and quite frankly I still have a lot to do in regards to that, so that's something I'm going to have to continue next week alongside my next assignments.

Additionally, I think I can do a bit more to make the interface for creating dialogue objects a bit cleaner. My first idea was to create a separate 'Dialogue' class that contains everything you see in the 'DialogObject' class and then have the latter class hold a list for the Dialogue class instead. I think it may make the process of creating new dialogue a little less tedious and shouldn't require too much reprogramming. It may be something that I test out next week and see how it goes.

I think that's all that has happened this week that I can recall. Thanks once again for reading and for keeping up with the development of this project, I should have some more interesting developments for you in the coming weeks so keep looking forward for that.