Thoughts on Dialogue

For a mobile or desktop game, what would be best practice for Dialogue .. would it be cool to do voice over style?  Not move mouths.. because characters are small.. but act out the dialogue for the game and cutscenes.. or use the usual face square on one side and the text showing next to it.. other ideas to get the point across of the conversations

I think it pretty much depends on how much time and money you want to spend.

This is how i do it currently (very standard):

• "Moving" mouth for in game characters to understand who is talking (very important if you ask me)
• Bigger portrait next to text - also important because the player gets radio calls and finds logs which dont show in the lev el

I tend to do text in a way I sorta read things (commas and periods take longer to draw than normal letters). As for characters, I just animate them when speaking. I also let the player know that text is done drawing (via "more below" arrow, or character animation)

Simple as that, really.

I like that a lot!

Great! I like those ideas!  I was thinking about voice acting my characters myself... so if save money   but I was thinking file size on mobile may be pretty big. Less programming though haha

I made a custom dialog system for my game. Characters have text they'll automatically say when not being interacted with, alongside text they'll say when the player interacts with them. The sprites on screen have talking animations that play when text is being drawn.



Dialog choices are also supported:



This system took a freakin long time to make and I definitely wouldn't want to put that much work into the dialog system of every game, but my game's very adventure-gamey so a robust dialog system was in order.

I made a custom dialog system for my game. Characters have text they'll automatically say when not being interacted with, alongside text they'll say when the player interacts with them. The sprites on screen have talking animations that play when text is being drawn.

Dialog choices are also supported:

This system took a freakin long time to make and I definitely wouldn't want to put that much work into the dialog system of every game, but my game's very adventure-gamey so a robust dialog system was in order.

Wow.. I love this.. is this your game?  I'd want to play it for sure!

Me too please

Thank you! I'm just posting about it on Twitter for now and I've been neglecting to make a devlog on the forums but I'll be sure to make one eventually

Hello Squeeb did you make any progress on this? I just started working on this as well for one of my new games.

Dialogue delivery can be surprisingly tricky. I've saved text as a png in Photoshop, then called the png text as needed in Stencyl. This is super easy to code and worked very well for my old game, but is not flexible in terms of delivery.

I'm working out a new system for a new game, Hidden Scrolls Skyward, which will deliver text in a more traditional letter-by-letter method, and perhaps have an "Animalese" a la Animal Crossing or Zelda series.

I'm thinking about posting a YouTube video on the topic as well for discussion/ideas/knowledge sharing.

@Irock Your dialogue system and game look awesome! Is this a customization of the available Dialogue Extension?

I haven't started the Diolouge part yet for my game.  I'd like to see what you create I'll update my progress as well!

I had to share this glitchy dialogue box. Yup. It's a work in progress...

Haha.thats awesome.. also!  I love the nes feel of the graphics . 

@Irock Your dialogue system and game look awesome! Is this a customization of the available Dialogue Extension?

Thanks! It's actually completely separate and custom made, though it shares many of the same features since I co-designed the dialog extension and have a particular taste for dialog systems.

It would have been nice to use the dialog extension, but I think it would have wound up being too much work to retrofit it for my game, given that I'm not nearly as familiar with the inner workings of the system as Justin is.

I had to share this glitchy dialogue box. Yup. It's a work in progress...

Wahaha, you might have figured this out already but it looks like you're using the player's scene coordinates to set the text box position, but you should use the player's screen coordinates instead since drawing is relative to the screen.