Enhancing Our Characters With Dialogue in Our Indie Game | Devlog #5
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 6 ต.ค. 2024
- Characters are the most important part of my game, so I'm going to need a powerful dialogue system that allows you to interact with them. So I created a dialogue system that will solve many of these problems and more.
Howdy, and welcome to the 5th indie game devlog for my game Zoe and the Cursed Dreamer. A 2D Action RPG made with the Godot Engine that focuses on the roleplaying through immersive gameplay and loveable characters.
Watch Emilio's tutorial on creating an RPG style dialogue box:
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I love how much you care about character dialogue, not that many game developers put that much time into it. Eric Barone would be proud
Eric Barone's characters are my biggest inspiration. I've never played a game that did characters better. I legit wanted to be Clint's best friend. Characters in RPGs were always my favorite, so it's my main focus for my game. :)
@@GameEndeavor Cool, that's what I thought keep up the great work.
"Here, take a dozen! No, a thousand!"
*inventory has been maxed out*
It surprisingly doesn't take up that much inventory space. About a hotbar and a half worth. I expected it to be full. XD
@@GameEndeavor It was that moment that I went into the mindset of "shut up and take my money." It's just too WHOLESOME!
@@Tutorial7a Glad you think so!
You were crushed under the weight of a thousand deltarune chapter 2 players will understand that one
"I used to be an adventurer like you, till I took a tutorial teddy bear to the knee."
Also, as a polish thing, it might be cool to swap the name and portrait based on what side of the MPC the player is on. That way the portrait is consistent in direction.
I intend to implement this. I think it'll look very nice. Just didn't get around to it for the devlog unfortunately.
The only issue is that with asymmetric characters some details like scars, haircuts, etc. will get swapped based on which side you approach them from.
The trivial solution is to provide rotated graphics. I wonder if there's a smarter solution.
Oh that's a good point, however I don't even remember this and had forgotten I wanted to implement it, lol. It probably won't be a thing as that could have different effects on the emotion of the dialogue I think.
Love how quick the game is coming together. It looks super cute already and it'll definitely be appealing to a wide audience. So excited to see more.
Thank you! I'm very happy with it, glad you're enjoying it. :)
Hahaha I loved this entry of the devblog. Didn't expect to make a cameo 🙈 took me by surprise haha. It is looking great, keep it up!
Thanks, bud. :) Your video was fantastic so I had to feature you. :) Been looking forward to your reaction.
when the witch becomes mad, you should make the bird mad too!
I come again to say Teddy looks like a wholesome character. I´m loving the artstyle for this game :)
lol, thanks. He's certainly one of my favorites atm character wise. :) I think a lot of people are going to like him.
I agree with that
@@GameEndeavor thanks for the heart! i'm going through watching all these videos. I subscribed on the first one!
Wow, seems that game is forming really fast. How long you've been working at this again?
I believe it's at around the 2 month mark now. First stream was July 2nd where we started prototying it. :)
@@GameEndeavor such a big progress for a short time , good work and good luck :D
Thank you. :) The weekly devlogs fuel my motivation.
DUDE !!! Already your game is amazing and your adding more and more brilliant ideas. I always look forward to your streams . I learn a lot.
Thank you! I enjoy doing them. They're a great way to interact with the community.
damn the speed of the dev log is crazy. Love the good work. Also thanks for keeping the pace of each episode so snappy
Thank you! Having to make one of these every week is doing of good job of keeping me in gear and not getting too distracted. :)
Seeing you make your game is really inspiring me to work on my own. I'm currently just drawing up a ton of art assets myself, hopefully I can make as much progress as you have.
I'm glad to hear it! You can do it, bud. You just have to keep at it. :) Good luck!
I REALLY LIKE THE ART OF THE CHARACTERS AND THE ART IN THE DIALOGUE. really good stuff
Thank you! I'm pretty happy with it. Genuinely my favorite art of anything I've ever arted.
You are pumping this vids like crazy! The crazy fact is that they are soooo great! Keep em coming!
Thank you! They are doing an excellent job of keeping me motivated and keeping me pushing forward. They do wonders for my progress. Glad you enjoy them.
As a developer, I'm SALIVATING at how deep the dialogue system is, also including that percentage reveal option. I wish Unity had these cool options and text effects
That's what hooked me into Godot when I first used it coming from Unity. It provides so much functionality right out of the box, but at the same time it's powerful enough to keep me happy and entertained.
The rich text label in Godot also has the visible_characters property that lets you customize the exact number of characters being shown, so if you don't like using the percentage you can use the actual amount.
@@thefurry7165 Indeed. For tweening it's fine because it's just a start and end point, it doesn't matter which I use. But later on I want to customize it more by adding pauses after punctuation and sounds while they speak. So for that I'm thinking I'll increment `visible_characters` with a timer based on what character is in text at that point.
The NPCs look great! Also nice work with the dialog system! Can't wait to give the game a try!
Thank you. :) Hopefully you can soon. I'm pushing for a demo early next year.
I cant wait to see what the story will be! This is looking great, and im sure you have something planned...
Indeed, spent a lot of time this week hashing out the story.
i want to play this game in the future so bad, its looking so great!!!
Thank you! I can't wait for people to play it. It's exciting. :)
The portrait evolution reminds me a lot of Stardew Valley.
Btw, amazing game, I'm loving it. What I didn't like about Stardew Valley was the speed of the game. I love fast games, so I'm definitely gonna buy this!
I think about that too, actually. I seen a post long ago of how his art evolved. Granted these portraits were done hours apart, but still the same concept. :)
I didn't like the pacing either. Mostly the combat. It was bland and hard to do. I like simple combat but there still needs to be some flavor to it.
This chat system looks great! I love the portrait of the NPC popping out the top.
Thank you. :) Still trying to figure out how I want to display the portrait, but I do like it this way. Might get a little tricky with other characters that don't fit in the alloted space, like the bird.
@@GameEndeavor Yeah it could be tricky to make a bird portrait. Perhaps you can just place the main bird sprite above the chat box.
@@Skeffles I want it to be in the witch's hair. I think it would be amusing and if it weren't then could confuse the player them thinking it left her hair.
@@GameEndeavor Ah yes the bird in the witches hair, I thought you just meant a bird.
It might be a 'little bit' more work but it would be cool to get the bird animated and flying on and off her head. That could be an interesting way to play with the idea of the bird disappearing.
I love you videos so much, you helped me get into game dev!
I'm glad to hear it! Good luck with you gamedev journey!
This looks really good! Love the pixel art
Thank you. :)
The game looks great, but I've always thought the main character seemed a little... bland. Is his design subject to change or are you settled on the current design?
He's very much going to change. I'm still learning character art. He has already changed so much in the time I've been working on this.
This is fantastic! The thought and care you take to build the world really gives it life. The characters are unique and charming in a way that you want to get to know them. The way you have set up the dialogue system will surely help to achieve that. Keep on dreaming!
Thank you! I'm glad to hear that, as that's exactly the emotion I'm trying to invoke. Thanks again for your fanart. That really made my day. :)
New sprites and Emilio to the rescue!
Indeed. Teddy is looking pretty darn good if I say so myself. Maybe we'll see more fanart since we now have a better look at the NPCs.
I love the part where Teddy ha ds you a thousand cookies, and I think that would be a hillarious quest. Maybe you need to make a cookie delivery for him, but the delivery is so big, that when he gives you all the cookies, it throws all your gear on the ground, because your character is just fully loaded with cookies. Like, he has no sword, he just has cookies. No armor or boots, just cookies. And you need to go make the delivery without the ability to fight back, so you have to just run away from baddies the whole way to your destination!
Yay! Devlog 5 is out!!
I love it!!!🤗🤗🤗
Yay! Thanks for watching. :)
This is SO GOOD and you're going SO FAST! I can't wait to play with this. Great job man! :D
Thank you. :) Hopefully you can around March some time.
That dialouge system seems pretty powerful. Cool video.
Thank you! I'm pretty satisfied with it. I wasn't sure how I was going to do it at first. It'll be even better once I make a tool for managing it.
Great stuff Love how fast this game evolves! If you find the time, it'd be nice if what you say to one guy affects the dialogue or stance of another guy once in a while.
That's already possible. I just have to set a variable with a command. :) I intend to do things like that.
Going to have to take some time studying this.
Looking really nice, loving the progress you are making :)
Thank you. :)
It might be difficult to do using the %visible variable, but I think it helps whenever a text reveal pauses for a moment at punctuation, like commas or periods. That way the sentence flows better instead of just going from one thought to another without any time to process what you're reading.
That is planned. I have an idea for it, but it's polish that's on the back burner. I can probably do it by incrementing the character value myself instead of tweening, and using a timer to pause between characters. Pausing longer for punctuation.
here's an idea: a robot character you find in a weird futuristic dungeon, that way you won't need to draw any ears
Robot character wouldn't fit the style of the game. :) It's not out of the question because we've joked about a time traveller on stream once, but it's still unlikely.
right, I should save the idea for a game of my own
Looks awesome.
Wow you are progressing so fast! Looking forward to ever devlog!
Thank you! Weekly devlogs keep my rear end in gear so I don't fall behind. :)
@@GameEndeavor Wow that seems like a great strategy, do you have any worries making your videos taking up valuable dev time?
@@abnermtj I don't for multiple reasons. As I said they keep me in gear, so I'm actually more productive doing them, but also it's marketing which every serious developer needs to take time out to do anyway. I'm just doing it in the form of video devlogs. :)
@@abnermtj If someone else wanted to do something similar but without all the work, then text devlogs may achieve the same affect. Though may not be as effective marketing wise.
Teddy: hi I’m Theodore but my friends call me teddy
Literally no one: ok Theodore
Everybody is his friend if you didn’t get it
Townsperson Nick:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.
In all seriousness, looks great! I really like the text border, makes the game look professional.
Thank you! That's actually my first attempt at a UI graphic. Not too bad, but I hope to improve on it in the future. :)
@@GameEndeavor Not a bad first attempt at all! I remember you saying last video you had a good amount of experience with aesprite it definitely shows
Thanks. :) A fair amount. I've been doing pixel art for a year, so I still have a lot of area for improvement.
Hey the speech system is looking nice. I also have a dumb idea. You know in avatar, there is cactus juice yeah so, make a mushroom cave with spoopy and strong mushroom demons which would give the character a good fight and would weaken him and you could use background and shadows towards a big yellow glowing mushroom, so the player would go there and would consume da mushroom and then after some time everything would appear trippy.
Thanks. :) I haven't watched avatar so I wouldn't know. There will be some mushroom themed things / areas, but no I don't intend to have the player tripping on mushrooms.
@@GameEndeavor just an idea :), also watch the last airbender
9/10, could be 10/10 with ears.
Goals.
Cool stuff and very informative. Thanks!
Thank you. :)
Teddy and Braum (from league of legends) are my kind of people. Soft-hearted and kind mustachio gentelmen.
A lot of people seem to resonate with that combination. To this day he's still a fan favorite. :)
this is looking extra DELICIOUS!
You have a strange appetite my friend, but I'm thankful for it. :)
@@GameEndeavor i am the one who told you about THICC eyebrows for teddy on stream
That was such a massive improvement. Thank you for the suggestion. :) It gave him a nice cartoon look.
Instead of tweening the text couldn't you just do percent_visible += 0.01. That's how I did my dialogue. But I didn't use a json file I just made it parse in an array which had strings. So it could be different.
Yeah, that's the same effect of of linear interpolate tween, but you have to keep doing it. With the Tween it's one and done. Though this current implementation is just the easiest. I may do something like that later but per character, so that I can add extras like pauses on punctuation and talking sound effects.
I'm loving how the game is turning out! Lol 1,000 cookies. oof
Imagine having 1,000 fresh baked cookies on hand.
Though it would be a ton of work, some games have given more important characters a chatbot ai designed for the game to increase immersion. If you have the time and resources that would be an interesting way to go.
Damn, this is so cool! : ) I am already curious to get to know these characters and how you interact with them in the game. I love games like Stardew Valley, but I always wished the characters would have some more depth both in narrative and game mechanics. Keep up the good work! :)
I'm glad you agree, I feel the same way. :) So that's why I really want to put a lot of my effort towards. World exploration and the characters. :D
@@GameEndeavor Awesome! :)
Dialogue looks fantastic. To manage the complexity have you thought of creating a graph node plugin to manage the json and all the branches? Dave The Dev did one and it's really nice.
For sure. It would be tedious for me to manually build all of these by hand, especially if I want to do any branching dialogue. I've never used the graph nodes so it'll be fun to learn.
@@GameEndeavor you can download his from the asset store for a starter or have a look at his youtube, I think he's got 3 or 4 in his dialogue series. No harm getting a head start 😉
@@neilwalker4277 Will do. :)
You didn't mention the witch and bird's name so I guess they weren't cemented yet? I can only remember Edythe for the Witch not the one you preferred but I guess Magus/Magnus is still being slept on now before you make a decision. Interesting to see your progress in game too I hope to see these done in tutorials later.
I totally forgot to mention the bird's name. The Witch's name is Selena. I never said it, but I used it in the dialogue label. The bird is Magnus Soren Eater of Wyrms, but Selena calls him Mr. Feathers. He hates that name.
I like the witch!
Thank you. :) I'm quite fond of her.
You should be able to help teddy get over his childhood and become a successful baker and if you do you will get 3 cupcakes that fully restore hp and make your defence increase for a short time ofcorse helping teddy will be very hard.
please add dipstick as an easter egg somewhere in the game
lol, I'll consider it.
I feel like the viking should say some stuff in viking symbols that can be decoded in a viking town.
how about we put the cookies in the bed and the milk in your shoes
Perhaps you should check out Ink or Yarn for dialogues. While straight up encoding dialogue flow in json or xml is easy to program, it can become unwieldy compared to a straight up specialized language for stories like this.
I plan to look into them but I'm thinking of writing my own tools for this. Godot has graph nodes that can be used for this and it sounds easy to make what I need.
Perhaps let developers program their own dialogue system that makes the most sense to them
@@ccgb92 they're also good examples to look at to estimate what your own solution should have and how to solve certain problems. I wouldn't have posted this if I haven't read a postmortem by a dev that was getting bogged down by their xml based dialogue solution until they found out about Ink.
@@inik4us I appreciate the heads up. :) I've never wrote dialogue for games so it will be a learning experience for me. I don't see myself having an issue but my lack of experience in this area wouldn't allow me to either way. Do you have a link to the postmortem? I'd love to see it. I will definately be looking at other tools to see what kinds of solutions they use.
I wonder how implementing something like that would work if you were programming this in C#
it looks great, nice work. Game dev is fun, but getting all the basic systems up and running is a bit of a pain/roadblock. Your system offhand looks like it's very well coded and organized
I only seen like 3 ep's of this, is it going to be a rpg where you get to the credits and thats it? or will it have a NG+ or after story for some kind of end game content?
I absolutely love post game content and New Game + and want to do some of that too. I don't which, if I can do both then great, lol.
@@GameEndeavor wish you best of luck :) looks good so far
Hey very cool of a video, but can you please tell me how you were able to show the dialogue box when you interact with a NPC because when ever I try it my player sprite goes behind the dialogue box is there a way to fix this.
I've been building a dialogue system recently in Unity, also with JSON and Unity's built in JsonUtility is awful.
I have to create my objects and pass in individual strings of JSON for each on while separating them with the | character.
I then need to loop these each time to get them read back into code so that I can use linq to get which dialogue options I need...
Anyway, as of right now I read every single line of dialogue into memory on load 😢
And don't even get me started on the nested loops I'm doing to pair up parent and child dialogue text (i.e. Conversations to each Sentence)
Oof, that sounds pretty painful. Hopefully you can figure that out soon.
You going really fast
I've quite a bit of experience programming game logic, so I'm fairly efficient at pumping out code. :)
@@GameEndeavor oh I'm 13 I recently started Godot hope I can be like you some day
@@templetherapy You have a head start on me then. I didn't start programming until I was 18. :) You'll do great.
You seem like you really know what you're doing, but I'm confused. Could you maybe make a more beginner-friendly tutorial on this?
can you do a tutorial on the dialog text boxes
(along with triggering them)
I don't make tutorials any more, sorry. :)
@@GameEndeavor but you were literally the best godot teacher on youtube (sorry heartbeast)
@@tss1473 You're very kind to say so. :) Sorry, bud. But my dream game calls out to me and I must answer it. :)
Heyhey, I have a question: I find pixel art fonts very hard to read and eye straining, would it make sense to add the possibility to choose between different fonts for better accessibility for all players?
Yeah, it's something I'm considering doing. After seeing complaints about pixel fonts, I released my demo with an HD font and got complaints about not using a pixel font. So I think giving an option might be a good way to go about it.
yay new vid
Yaaay!
Yaaaaaaaay (Most likely).
Is there a tutorial for this because i wanted to do this with my game too
can you help me ?
I'm trying to make an automatic dialogue, without having to press a key to go to another dialogue, I've tried everything.
Could you type your character name in the game or if not you should name the player Henry
Yes, I'm planning to let you name your character (most likely).
Okay thanks (Most likely).
lol
Hello! How can I make it so that when a dialog is called, it always appears in a certain place on the screen?
what did you use to make the game btw?
Godot Engine. :)
Where's the game? I want play it
bacana heim
i even helped by saying going bald!!!
I swear to god.. the last 4 indie videos i JUST watched all had games looking IDENTICAL!!! If i pasted the videos together, apart from the person speaking u would think it was the same game... the indie scene was supposed to be about INDEPENDENT THINKING!!! Not copying farmville.. These crafting games are like the HELLO WORLD of indie games..
lol, what are you even on about? I haven't mentioned farming or crafting. I'm making an RPG... Besides, if an indie developer wants a crafting system in their game, then they should do it. THAT'S what the indie scene is about. Making the game YOU want to make, chasing YOUR dream, regardless of what some peckerhead thinks about it.
Stop watching RPG indie devlogs and complaining about them being RPG indie games, and go find whatever you're into. Let people make the games they want to make.
5:15 What language is that?
This game is looking great but this man looks like he’s pulling up to the farmers market in a cart pulled by oxen
I know this is a bit late but maybe pay the artist that drew the portraits and use their work for your game. They seem to be really experienced and it porbably would take a long time for you to get to this level. So idk if its worth it if you have great art like that right in front of you
I drew these portraits, on a livestream in fact if you'd like to watch:
th-cam.com/video/sTLbl6T5iNI/w-d-xo.html
If you like portraits, I did some more just a couple of days ago aswell:
th-cam.com/video/rbj3civOyPA/w-d-xo.html
tutorial pls for how you make it step by step
I'm not making tutorials anymore.
I can't believe you type lorem ipsum manually. Unsubscribed.
XD
Godot can use the Emmet plugin that lets you do lorem25[tab] and get a block of text.
@@Any_key404 Oh really? Does it generate them for variety? Because I got a little tired of copying and pasting different text.
Do you realise that you have a talent? It’s a pity to see you do something else that you don’t have a talent for, while you could have spent the time applying your talent and having the other stuff done by people who have talent in that other area.