FrancisYesterday at 2:40 AM
Hey!

olivinearcYesterday at 3:28 AM
Hey there!!

FrancisYesterday at 4:08 AM
We could have a quick chat today to talk about the amount of work that needs to be done and discuss the project in more detail! Let me know when is a good time for you!

olivinearcYesterday at 12:49 PM
That would be awesome! I should be free at any time now that PAX is over ^^ Are you better in the morning or evening?

FrancisYesterday at 12:50 PM
Anytime is good for me!

olivinearcYesterday at 12:50 PM
Oh, cool! Now then lol?

FrancisYesterday at 12:50 PM
Yep that works

olivinearcYesterday at 12:51 PM
awesome, give me five mins then
how've you been?

FrancisYesterday at 12:51 PM
Doing good! Just got back from vacation last week so I am refreshed! And you? Not too tired from pax?

olivinearcYesterday at 12:58 PM
eh, a little! bc it's been basically 6+ days it's tiring in one way but then in other ways you move past the first wave of memes
also awesome!!
yeah so i was speaking with the people boothing w/ me bc i was at the visual novel reading room, and they suggested checking out the gamedevclassifieds reddit bc we're interested in porting our game into unity
this is my first time really talking about something like this though so apologies if i say something confusing - where is usually best to start?

FrancisYesterday at 1:01 PM
No worries! Usually it's good to start with what you have so we can see what it takes to port it to Unity (Amount of features/content), this helps me establish the scope of the work. From there I can give you my input on how I'd do it and how much time it takes
I saw a youtuber play your game? Is that possible?
I only saw a few dialogs and some choices being made to move from scene to scene

olivinearcYesterday at 1:02 PM
oh, yes! that sounds about right for a visual novel
compared to something procedurally generated or like really heavy 3d or action based, visual novels tend to be more like, hm
how you'd view a play. so there's a bit of sprite moving, both across the scene but with sprite variants (diana has an arm raised or an arm lowered) but since we wanted to make this a strict visual novel, there's no extra minigames at this time - just speech bubbles, monologue bubbles, and choices
have you played dragalia lost?

FrancisYesterday at 1:04 PM
I have not, but I can see what it is from a quick google search

olivinearcYesterday at 1:05 PM
oh it's ok lemme grab specif what i mean
so dragalia has small text segments to tell their story, and it's made in unity, and it's similar (if a little diff bc it;s made for mobile)
lemme go find a video
https://youtu.be/r89-QiM3kIU?t=368
YouTube
NemesisTV
Dragalia Lost - Side Story | Episode 1 & 2 - Xainfried (Cutscenes ...

so this video first off shows a bit of movement but the most important thing personally for me is in the background you can see particles
which i know are a thing in the unity asset store
that's one of the big reasons i was considering moving to unity, since we have some small parallax animated backgrounds in our game (clouds moving) and people adore that extra bit of polish
the others are also bc among other things, a sony rep hit us up yesterday and said that if we do move to unity it'd be way easier to port to playstation (insert a wink or three here from him)

FrancisYesterday at 1:08 PM
Yeah Unity has good support for releasing on consoles
are you the artist making the backgrounds ?

olivinearcYesterday at 1:09 PM
no, but i work with them and ask them to keep certain layers seperate in mind to make things easier
i am an artist but in the context of this project i mostly help with UI/promo/merchandise

FrancisYesterday at 1:10 PM
No worries! you understand what needs to be done (layers etc..) so that's fine

olivinearcYesterday at 1:11 PM
awesome! and yeah, like lemme grab the ks page...
https://ksr-ugc.imgix.net/assets/022/993/086/73ef41893ac551086bed03d7b8cc6415_original.gif?ixlib=rb-2.1.0&w=680&fit=max&v=1540276159&auto=format&gif-q=50&q=92&s=951307ee05292f3790f98b99937bb728

is like the first thing people rly saw of our first build
i mean it was a full proper loop but yeah

FrancisYesterday at 1:12 PM
Yeah I see, looks great!

olivinearcYesterday at 1:12 PM
this is about the level of intensity i think can be expected for animation
i'm uploading a copy of our PAX build rn as well bc it's gotten some UI updates and such

FrancisYesterday at 1:13 PM
No worries, so there are no other features besides speech bubbles / monologues and choices? I guess the entire story is scripted with a specific timeline of events?

olivinearcYesterday at 1:14 PM
i think so, in a sense? but there is still like branching options so it might be best to think of it as 6 different timelines that split off from 1 point in the middle
we want the choices to matter so when you do pick a choice there tends to be a callback to it in a later scene

FrancisYesterday at 1:14 PM
that makes sense
How many lines / choice do you have in total ?

olivinearcYesterday at 1:15 PM
we can't say for certain because we haven't completely finished the script yet, but we tend to have at least one to two choices per scene, with 2000 words on average per scene, and an estimaged endgame of 300,00 words total for the entire game

FrancisYesterday at 1:18 PM
that's fine, ideally we make a system that is easy for you to change the script. Who is writing the script? In what format (Word, excel etc..)?

olivinearcYesterday at 1:18 PM
we have six writers, one for each route (one of them me) and we write the script in google docs so editors can access it easier
let me grab you an example of our script currently

FrancisYesterday at 1:19 PM
That would be great thanks. Do any have experience with Version control (Github and others..)

olivinearcYesterday at 1:20 PM
only a little, our old programmer said that she used it but we're not on the best terms as of late
we appreciate sticking to a deadline

FrancisYesterday at 1:20 PM
Sad to hear! Yes deadlines are important

olivinearcYesterday at 1:20 PM
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aPXWmsdhrdHUoR-R3UERZYlWgb1QTte9g5dLgxJ3SNU/edit?usp=drive_web&ouid=101576201230718780732 so this is what we gave to the programmer, but it's always been an improving process to make it easier for the programmer to implement things as well
Google Docs
EV PAX - HOBBY LOBBY CHALLENGE
--- [DIANA and EVERARD are on scene, Diana is SCARED + ARM UP, Ev is DEFAULT + NO HORNS. RAIN SFX PLAYS OVER THE ENTIRE SCENE.] [ENTER SCENE FROM LEFT, BOTH FACE RIGHT] DIANA (STILL SCARED) // Oh my god, I can’t believe we did that! EVERARD (STILL DEFAULT + TURN LEFT) /...

the // would represent the amount of stuff we'd like on one screen at a time

FrancisYesterday at 1:21 PM
I was asking because it would really be great if we had it setup in a way where writers can edit the data, and we load the data in the game, so any change they make is automatically reflected in the game. This way I don't have to keep up with edits and changes, as it is prone to mistakes and can end up being quite expensive for you

olivinearcYesterday at 1:22 PM
gosh, if there was a way to do that that'd be awesome
i think the tough thing for us has been like
just like real typesetting in an actual comic there's no way to fully automate the word placement
you can like get a good 70% of it like that but there's always going to have to be tweaking

FrancisYesterday at 1:25 PM
Yeah I don't think there's any avoiding that. If we are going to do this I think the best way is to come up with a proper system or "modus operandi" that makes it easy to create content without too much development. Given the amount of words / choices etc .. But of course there will be tweaking
So you have about 150 scenes ?
(just with 300,000/2000) but maybe you reuse scenes for different dialogues

olivinearcYesterday at 1:27 PM
that sounds about right - we have a general limit of 25-30 scenes per month total spread across the characters, and there's 6 months in the game, thereabouts
here i have another graphic ;v also two mins left to uploading

is how we tend to approach the game's chapters
we also have a normal outline and stuff that's more summarized but since the game itself is formatted like this it worked out

FrancisYesterday at 1:29 PM
Ok that makes sense

olivinearcYesterday at 1:29 PM
the GROUP scenes are technically just 1 scene even though you see several tabs

FrancisYesterday at 1:30 PM
So if we take a part of the script here, just so I can make sure I understand the intent

are all these characters on screen while this is happening ?
(speech bubbles)

olivinearcYesterday at 1:30 PM
the black text, yes
ah here we go
oh wait
gosh i'm still learning dropbox
it was uploading the big big folder, it's speeding through the rest of the game

FrancisYesterday at 1:31 PM
no worries
and what do the blue and green text define, is it the style of the text (color, size etc.. )

olivinearcYesterday at 1:32 PM
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/elehat17iifzozb/AAD7h97yksLCkOy7k65dSsUEa?dl=0 ok this should work
Dropbox
PAX Build
Shared with Dropbox

blue is typically choreo, green is expressions!
although it might not be entirely consistent, it was a bit of a last minute attempt

FrancisYesterday at 1:33 PM
expressions as the characters face will be animated ?

olivinearcYesterday at 1:33 PM
not like the backgrounds are, we have the expressions separated from the character as layers and they're static images
is an old guide we used to use


FrancisYesterday at 1:34 PM
ok I see

olivinearcYesterday at 1:34 PM
(before i split the eyes and mouths in half)
yeah!

FrancisYesterday at 1:35 PM
And how has the previous developer integrate all this in the game
? did he do it manually ?

olivinearcYesterday at 1:35 PM
would it be possible to rephrase that?

FrancisYesterday at 1:36 PM
sorry, I mean did he take each line of the script and enter it himself in the game ? Or do you have some sort of system going on

olivinearcYesterday at 1:37 PM
i rrreally don't know for sure, she like.. she made a visual editor so placing things would be easier, i know that, but i think she manually enetered every line of script
bc we used to use ren'py before we used monogame and that was Awful with capital A

FrancisYesterday at 1:37 PM
haha I see

olivinearcYesterday at 1:37 PM
since we'd have to manually enter coordinates, this way we could just drag and drop and resize bubbles

FrancisYesterday at 1:37 PM
Was anyone else using the editor tool or was it just her ?

olivinearcYesterday at 1:38 PM
it was so clunky she was the only one who could

FrancisYesterday at 1:38 PM
is anyone interested in working in Unity directly ?
(just trying to figure out what kind of dev tools we need )

olivinearcYesterday at 1:39 PM
it would depend on the level of difficulty but if needed i'm willing to help -  especially with things like bubble placement and text adjustment but i do also want to bring up that i'm a student still (the only one on the team) and that this current semester of school is sort of a big thing for my timeline
other members of the team are willing to help occasionally if it's simple as well

FrancisYesterday at 1:39 PM
Do they also place text bubbles or do they only write ?

olivinearcYesterday at 1:39 PM
like in the script or in our old engine
bc the programmer was the only one who was able to touch the old engine
like we could fiddle with it but we had no way of transferring

FrancisYesterday at 1:40 PM
In the event it was easy to edit a scene, would the writers participate in the visual aspect or do they strictly write, is what I meant

olivinearcYesterday at 1:41 PM
strictly write, preferably - the programmer had to do program in all the animations or expression swaps with our old engine, but if it's easier in unity we're willing to give it a shot
with old engine it was like literal math equations

FrancisYesterday at 1:42 PM
Unity has good tools for this - But i don't expect a content creator to have to do this, once we add dianas 11 expressions it's done until we change the expressions
So thats easy - I was thinking that we probably should think up of a way to streamline the process of getting the content from the writers into the game without too much intervention, then we would have a "scene designer" , either me with mockups or you directly, use that content to setup a scene
I haven't thought it through too much but for example we could use excel, the first column defines the scene, the second the name of the person speaking, the third the expression, the 4th is the actual line to be written, the 5th would be the choice etc ...
this way we just need to add "tools" in the engine where all this needs to be shown , for example

olivinearcYesterday at 1:45 PM
i can't quite fully grasp it and i likely won't ever but also i like things that sound clean and easier for all involved :)
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/397597400102993921/615354033372397588/unknown.png is sort of how our old one worked. ish.

dragging the bubbles to resize was tough bc no indicators or anything but yeah

FrancisYesterday at 1:48 PM
yeah Unity has all that to make it really easy. With a system like I mentioned before we can for example automatically set the background and expression to be shown from the excel sheet, and all that would left to be done is put 2 "position" markers in the actual editor where the bubble needs to appear. the text would automatically be filled from the excel file . So if a writer changes a line, they just change the excel sheet and it is automatically replaced in the game without my intervention

olivinearcYesterday at 1:48 PM
oh wtf i love the sound of that
so the only sort of manual updating we'd have to do is when the doc is updated, to update the excel sheet
we like to keep docs both for ease of commenting but also it's just easier to edit when formatted like that
and to read in gen but yeah

FrancisYesterday at 1:50 PM
Yeah, when the game loads it loads up the "file" containing the data, so it doesn't matter how often it changes. Obviously doing it this way probably won't work with something like google docs because there is no formatting I can rely on, there is excel but there are other ways to lay it out

olivinearcYesterday at 1:50 PM
easier to touch up an excel (or sheets, preferably?) doc than going right into unity though, right?

FrancisYesterday at 1:50 PM
exactly

olivinearcYesterday at 1:50 PM
awesome

FrancisYesterday at 1:51 PM
say the 3rd scene is Diana talking and they want to change the expression or what she said - They open up the file, change the line and the expression and update it. Nothing else needs to be done and you don't need to open Unity

olivinearcYesterday at 1:51 PM
i would love that, honestly
like we try to have scenes done and edited before we show them to the programmer but sometimes typos and stuff happen
or a bubble ends up looking weird on screen vs on paper so we have to split them, etc.

FrancisYesterday at 1:52 PM
I think it's the only sensible way to do it or else it's too much work for the programmer to keep up with 6 writers and other artists
for the bubbles we would need to place them manually, as I mentioned with a position marker in Unity, but we could also think up a system to automate that, for example

olivinearcYesterday at 1:53 PM
hmm, maybe? i'm not the best with tech obvs but i'm just thinking about like
how each bubble essentially has a unique size
were you able to dl that dropbox link and gt it working btw?
we've had some weird stuff during PAX

FrancisYesterday at 1:54 PM
I have, I've been clicking through it while we've been chatting

olivinearcYesterday at 1:54 PM
oh phew, cool

FrancisYesterday at 1:54 PM
a crude example of what I mean by automatign the bubbles, is again the excel sheet can define the placement of the bubble by using a number - and from that we use a grid

(crude example)
This is called data oriented programming, and we could decide on ways to automate things
the bubble thing might not be necessary if you want to place them by hand in each scene, or have me do it, this is just an example

olivinearcYesterday at 1:56 PM
would it be possible to use this as a beginning template and then i can go in and manually adjust ( or someone else) from there?

FrancisYesterday at 1:56 PM
That could work. We can do anything really. We just need to layout the "tools" we want to automate and try to make up a system that works (like the bubbles)
for adjustements for example, I can say "use the number in the excel file, unless someone has placed it manually then leave it there"

olivinearcYesterday at 1:57 PM
gotcha!
and that'd be helpful to you too, right?

FrancisYesterday at 1:58 PM
Well I don't really mind placing them all based on a mockup like you showed above, it's just time consuming (which means expensive to you)
We could potentially find a junior developer to help with the easier tasks and reduce costs

olivinearcYesterday at 1:58 PM
nah, i get picky with the bubbles anyway

FrancisYesterday at 1:58 PM
but it still doesn't compare to automated

olivinearcYesterday at 1:58 PM
honestly a golden scenario would be me actually hitting someone up who's used to lettering/bubbling and get them to do the final finagling

FrancisYesterday at 1:59 PM
that works

olivinearcYesterday at 2:00 PM
but yeah so the gist is that we can automate a lot of the rough and dirty work and then the inevitable fine touching is still possible later on
?

FrancisYesterday at 2:01 PM
I can make editor tools in Unity for this kind of thing, or write a system to do it automatically from a file. Both would allow for manually tweaking in the editor for specific things

olivinearcYesterday at 2:01 PM
gotcha. i know in the old editor actually putting text in had a text file pop up when you double clicked the bubble
and that's where the text would get fussed over

FrancisYesterday at 2:02 PM
Unity is a little different, it has an inspector

olivinearcYesterday at 2:02 PM
i mean honestly the world is your oyster if it means cheaper and easier

FrancisYesterday at 2:02 PM
So when you click on a text object, you have a series of settings in the inspector for things like position, font, color, text etc..

olivinearcYesterday at 2:02 PM
ooh, i like that
we could probably automate stuff like the bubbles too, right? like if we put in the excel sheet "forrest bubble" or whatever

FrancisYesterday at 2:04 PM
Exactly, we can automate anything, we just need to define a "scheme" a stick to it. So in the excel sheet column 13 would be for "bubble type" and we can enter the bubble we want for each line
Or maybe have a seperate file that has data for an entire scene (if all the bubbles use the forest bubble in that scene it would be wasteful to specify it line by line ) for example
We could just select the bubble type in Unity directly if we dont think its valuable to automate.
We're going to have to pick our winners
If youre still not sure how all this would work, you could send me art assets for 1 scene and I could make a quick 1h prototype as an example

olivinearcYesterday at 2:08 PM
i don't think there'd ever be an instance where it's just one character monologing, just as a heads up
i do think this all sounds very nice though, and like
efficient and clean, at least on paper HAHA

FrancisYesterday at 2:09 PM
Yeah haha, I still need to get a better understanding of everything so I can write a proper system to use, still wrapping my head around all the needs

olivinearcYesterday at 2:09 PM
yeah! there's a lot to set up even for visual novels
although i know the bubbles are atypical, i think they're part of the reason we're so successful

FrancisYesterday at 2:10 PM
Placing everything manually is too error prone and expensive so i think it's worth spending time finding good way to streamline the process
Exactly, trying to avoid some setup costs for you and for this not to take years to make haha
(Meeting deadlines)

olivinearcYesterday at 2:11 PM
[chanting] stream line stream line
i know it's a little soo but with the proccess of automation, i think like
if you do you know certain things like "on average we can fit (xyz) characters per line on an average bubble" since we have a ton of them from the prologue to reference
we can try to accomodate within reason to these to prevent too much custom fussing, too
when it comes to like sizing and stuff

FrancisYesterday at 2:12 PM
Unity can scale the text to fit the bubble too
(Automatically)

olivinearcYesterday at 2:12 PM
hm, i think we'd want the opposite
that way everything is, say, a consistent 14 pt

FrancisYesterday at 2:13 PM
Makes sense, we could make that work as well

olivinearcYesterday at 2:13 PM
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1wSxsaeGO7V63WgBjJgToizxZdClwaLXZ here should be the latest bubbles, for reference

FrancisYesterday at 2:13 PM
If we can 9 slice the bubbles right they can be any size
Yep that works

olivinearcYesterday at 2:14 PM
oh it does, even animated?
that's so cool omg

FrancisYesterday at 2:14 PM
Even animated
Unity is a very powerful engine, there are a lot of things built in, and I can make custom ones on top

olivinearcYesterday at 2:18 PM
Gosh, that’s so cool

FrancisYesterday at 2:18 PM
Obviously before we start with any system I'll show it to you in screenshare, explain how it works and get your approval before we mass produce scenes

olivinearcYesterday at 2:18 PM
And I noticed your reddit post had the info deleted, is it ok to refresh me about yourself?

FrancisYesterday at 2:19 PM
I just delete the old post to put up a new one when it gets burried
https://www.reddit.com/r/gameDevClassifieds/comments/cynajr/for_hire_senior_software_engineer_looking_for
reddit
r/gameDevClassifieds - [For Hire] Senior software engineer looking...
2 votes and 0 comments so far on Reddit
This is the post you read initially

olivinearcYesterday at 2:20 PM
Oh I see!

FrancisYesterday at 2:20 PM
I forgot to mention in there I have over 7 years experience with Unity
If you have any other questions fire away!

olivinearcYesterday at 2:22 PM
understood!
sorry, had to find a drink haha

FrancisYesterday at 2:22 PM
No worries, I have time!

olivinearcYesterday at 2:23 PM
man, working on farcry must have been cool

FrancisYesterday at 2:23 PM
It was! I think its the best franchise at Ubisoft

olivinearcYesterday at 2:24 PM
ohoho
i guess what i should ask is what issues do you see being prominent when working on swt?

FrancisYesterday at 2:27 PM
Well my first worry was integrating the amount of content, but with good tools hopefully we make it a breeze.

The second concern would be the amount of work to be done, it's no small workload so we need to plan accordingly to meet the deadlines we set.

There are others but I think those are the most prominent

olivinearcYesterday at 2:27 PM
understood - what could we do to assist you in those?

FrancisYesterday at 2:28 PM
All I need is for us to work together to establish a proper workflow to build the game!

olivinearcYesterday at 2:28 PM
okay!! that should hopefully be good
we're admittedly in a weird state of flux right now due to wanting to swap engines but also like
pax just sort of flinging new opportunities in us
which is good but also still in the works
*at us

FrancisYesterday at 2:28 PM
How many scenes total in the demo?

olivinearcYesterday at 2:28 PM
the one i gave you? technically 7
the intro with diana and youtube, then one scene for each love interest

FrancisYesterday at 2:29 PM
And how many other scenes are done in gamemaker but arent in the demo?

olivinearcYesterday at 2:29 PM
none
our programmer was lying to us about a lot

FrancisYesterday at 2:30 PM
Alright, wouldn't take long to get right back to where you are but in Unity

olivinearcYesterday at 2:30 PM
oh that's a silver lining!
so i'm like
99% sure we're going to have to find a publisher to be able to afford you by the way (and we want one anyways but yeah) but that may also take a bit of time just so we can tread carefully

FrancisYesterday at 2:32 PM
Sure thats a common concern, I have no issues with that! Publishers are hard to find for investments (usually they offer marketing stuff) but it's not like you'rr making the 1000th RPG to hit the store this week, so I have high hopes

olivinearcYesterday at 2:33 PM
yeah! we had a couple offers and i want to reach out to a couple more now, it's just finding the right fit

FrancisYesterday at 2:33 PM
Nice!


FrancisYesterday at 9:26 PM
and I'll make it happen in the game

olivinearcYesterday at 9:26 PM
Like so when I tell the old programmer and the writers, I told them the rule of thumb is typically three bubbles on the screen max at a time, four at absolute max
Usually between the two characters - oops lag
Gotcha!
I like making preset things too when possible so hmhm

FrancisYesterday at 9:28 PM
that makes sense, I can write a validator that runs through ALL the files and makes a log like: Scene 134 has more than 3 speech bubbles at 1 time!
to catch any mistakes
that doesn't take long
The idea is when you story board the entire scene I create a file like this one - Then you can go edit it when you want to make changes
with my example above if the last <Monologue> tag doesn't have the right expression, you can just open the file, and change Expression="Default" to Expression="Sad" for example
the game will play the sad animation
so i'd be writing most of the file - Andit wouldn't be too hard for you to learn how to edit it, it's in plain text
I say you but it could be any other team member
I guess if you're on your phone this might not be too clear, but you can check when you get back home and we can rediscuss
This is just one example of how to do this so don't be afraid to give me your feedback, if it's too complex for the team members I can simplify it
Ideally when a writer wants to change a line, he opens up the folder, goes to the folder of the scene he wants, opens up the file for that scene, goes to the monologue/dialogue line he wants and changes it. Then he saves, and the game is automatically updated with the changes

olivinearcYesterday at 9:38 PM
My phones in a spotty area as a heads up!

FrancisYesterday at 9:38 PM
no worries

olivinearcYesterday at 9:39 PM
And gotcha for sure! I think I’m most@curious about like
Bubble placement
Since if it wasn’t obvs there’s so many variations on a layout while still having constants depending on size

FrancisYesterday at 9:41 PM
Well looking at the grid I made, if you say the bubble is in sector 2, then it would be centered on the sector
If a bigger bubble doesnt fit well centered on that sector, you can just change the grid
We cna split the grid in 32 squares if we want for example allowing you to define the center position you want. If the bubble doesnt fit well at position 29, you can bump it over to position 30 for example
For each bubble individually
You can also make uneven sectors to better layout a specific scene
It doesnt have to be a grid
You create the sectors and layout the spacing of the scene and we replicate it in the engine
We could also remove the bubble placement from the file entirely, and place it all in the engine by hand if you want, I'm just pitching ideas to see what you prefer. Not everything needs to be in the file, but then it means you need to fire up the engine every time

olivinearcYesterday at 9:55 PM
Gotcha! Nah the less firing up the better
That was one nice thing about our old engine - we didn’t have to actually boot the game up to test and see where we adjusted a bubble

FrancisYesterday at 9:57 PM
What do you mean? Did you have an editor to see 1 specific scene?

olivinearcYesterday at 9:58 PM
Oh like, that screenshot I sent you was literally our engine so we’d load diff scenes into it
Similar to how you open a PSD, per se
However if unity works on my surface then it’s not a big deal, I can run PS on it fine

FrancisYesterday at 9:59 PM
You wouldnt need to fire up unity at all, or make a new build to see the changes, but you would have to launch the .exe to see it
You wouldnt have to click through all the scenes to get to the one you want, we can make it open the scene you want directly

olivinearcYesterday at 10:00 PM
Gotcha, and there’d be a bugtest mode to make things easier to jump to a - ooh
Beat me to it

FrancisYesterday at 10:00 PM
Haha yeah of course thats not a problem

olivinearcYesterday at 10:01 PM
It def would have been a pain otherwise with how long it can take to click through a screen
Btw so our settings screen
Is everything we have there possible?
So dark mode, dyslexic font, etc

FrancisYesterday at 10:02 PM
In the settings screen of the demo I only saw bubble style light and dark
But yes it would definitely be possible to make changes to the entire game from settings in that screen

olivinearcYesterday at 10:03 PM
Oh - right, bc it was just for pax
We’d like to eventually have dyslexic font be possible!
Also text scroll speed, volume andddf
Just switches for audio basically
And autoplay
For like text

FrancisYesterday at 10:04 PM
Yep all that is not an issue, I actually just noticed the voice acting volume
Will you have voice actors for each line?

olivinearcYesterday at 10:04 PM
Yes, we’ve already done casting and -
Mmmm maybe not every but have you played ds fire emblem?
So it’s partial sound bytes

FrancisYesterday at 10:05 PM
Then the dialogues can't change? Or is it just sfx?
Ah ok, no I havent played it

olivinearcYesterday at 10:05 PM
We would like full voice acting for CGs - ah google fire emblem awakening support log chrom
Like on yt I mean, just for the most exact example I can think of

FrancisYesterday at 10:07 PM
Ok i see, yeah thats fine
Again we can add a tag <SoundByte=4> to specify a byte to be played on that bubble

olivinearcYesterday at 10:08 PM
Yay! Just wanted to make sure
Oh this may not be in settings, but it was in our itch demo
We would like a Log function
So like it’s a menu option, and clicking it basically shows the conversation log

FrancisYesterday at 10:10 PM
Of whatever was said in the scene up to this point? like a separate screen

olivinearcYesterday at 10:10 PM
Yes!

FrancisYesterday at 10:10 PM
Yep that's no issue

olivinearcYesterday at 10:10 PM
Awesomeeee
Oh hey I didn’t know it but another member of the team knows a bit of unity too, yay

Every little bit helps

FrancisYesterday at 10:12 PM
That's great, not sure I will be needing to share code but she's welcome to look around if she likes haha

olivinearcYesterday at 10:12 PM
She likes to help, it’s a morale boost if nothing else

FrancisYesterday at 10:12 PM
your old engine is in c# too!

olivinearcYesterday at 10:13 PM
I guesssss
She had trouble using the old engine tho

FrancisYesterday at 10:14 PM
with our setup no one should have to fight with the engine, most of it can be configured directly in that file
(if we chose to go that way of course)

olivinearcYesterday at 10:14 PM
There were some interface glitches I think but
Yeah
Basically the team is weirdly invested in the game, not to look a gift horse in the mouth, so I’m just glad they’re happy too
Yay! Ok so hmmm maybe
If there’s a way I can basically relay them your considerations I can see what they like, maybe?

FrancisYesterday at 10:16 PM
hmmm well, my wall of text?
I can also send you the file I made as an example if they want to see and know a bit of how XML works
You can also put us all in the same group and I can explain it again
the screenshot you already shared to them should have a lot of info already but it might not be clear enough

FrancisYesterday at 10:38 PM
I need to headout for a bit but hopefully my examples help, we'll need to define the tags you need to make everything you want to have happen but I don't think that takes too long. From what I saw in the demo the scenes are similar enough for this to work smoothly. We can have extra docs that explain what tags can be used and how for reference and organize each scene in its own folder

olivinearcYesterday at 10:38 PM
Yeah no sweat! I appreciate you talking so much to me today ^^
Sorry I had to space out st the end but I’m enjoying what I’m hearing so far

FrancisYesterday at 10:39 PM
No worries! A lot of talking will be necessary to get it right! You can also add me to any group if anyone has questions!

olivinearcYesterday at 10:39 PM
Will do!

olivinearcYesterday at 11:26 PM
btw! which francis are you on linkedin?

FrancisToday at 7:29 AM
I actually don't use LinkedIn, it's too spammy and serves no purpose

olivinearcToday at 7:32 AM
ah, gotcha!

olivinearcToday at 7:33 PM
Just as a heads up me and the publisher dude are gonna have another call on friday to discuss milestones and things

olivinearcToday at 9:00 PM
Also! If possible, are there any references we could doublecheck with? And a portfolio?