Developer Diary 33 - The Event System

Release 2 had a few simple events, which all were very basic in their design. A character pops up, with a dialogue box, and you click through some text. The sprite of the character might change as you click through, but that is pretty much where functionality ended for this system. It worked, for that build, but now I am finding myself more and more limited and I’ve come to realize I need to rebuild the event system from the ground up so I can really implement events in the way I want.

One game series that has always really stuck with me in terms of having great “events” (or simply, going through dialogue screens) is the Ace Attorney series. Using a few very simple techniques and having the possibility to combine these together, they end up with a very large bag of tricks to choose from so they can set the mood and design a scene however they like.

Many, many other games have these features as well, but I like how Ace Attorney does it, since their approach to character portraits is pretty much exactly how I want to do it. 

The way I think about a dialogue system is that it operates like a train, going from station to station. Whenever the player clicks “next”, the train will move from its current station to the next. Along the way we are on rails and the game automatically presents things to the player. These can be screens, dialogue, sounds, fade-in/fade-out, you name it. This is how I want to build my system as well. While I had the rough setup right where the game moves forward whenever you click on the “next” button, nothing could really happen in between, which is the key part. I need to somehow design the state the game can be in where the player is not in control, yet things still happen.

To give a simple example: The player clicks on “next”, the textbox disappears, the screen fades to black. The screen is black for 1 or 2 seconds, then fades in to a new location. After 1 or 2 seconds again a character portrait shows up, a sound plays, and a dialogue box pops up with the ability for the player to finally regain control of the scene.

Having these tools available allows me to control things like mood, pace, etc. All of these I need so I can more strongly convey the story to you and gives me creative control. When I have this system built, I will have a much stronger base to build my story events on, so it is pretty exciting to begin working on it!

I also made a list of all the things I need to do for Release 3, and it has been shrinking steadily, so that is good :)

Finally I have laid out the rough story line for the church location in the game. This will focus around mind control/hypnosis and a cult-related plot. That's all you get for now though~

Thanks for reading and for the continued support! I have some more news coming along soon so keep your eyes peeled for that as well!

Albatross