squeak squeaksqueak sueak!!!
Progress In Engine
Dialogue System Implementation: My main task lately has been to build two new iterations of our dialogue system. So far, I’ve built one, the “text bubble” version where dialogue appears over a character’s head, and as you approach a character, they may broadcast a message to you which you can respond to by opening up your keyboard and typing a response. As mentioned last week, this version is meant to take emphasis away from the dialogue system and investigation. The implementation is honestly quite terrible, it’s not even duct tape and glue, it’s toothpicks stacked on top of each other end to end in a straight line. But it works, and if we decide to use this, I’ll just remake it anyways! The reason it’s so terrible is that, rather than building it from scratch, I copied and edited the scripts from the original dialogue system to work with it, but they needed more changes than I realized, specifically for the player entering and leaving proximity.
Up next is the system where the player has super limited stickers, but can take stickers from an NPCs message to replace one of their own. This one is mostly implemented, but I realized that the dialogue script would need a list of every single sticker prefab, and I was too tired to do that. But once that’s there, it should be able to pass those prefabs to the parser and spit them out to the player as needed. So some busy work left on that one! We received some warning that this one may start to feel like a puzzle game, and I have some worries myself about that and about the fact that it could really easily balloon, and if it doesn’t it may feel really unresponsive, even moreso than what we have now, because we’re setting an expectation that you should get responses to the stickers you take, and it’s fun to get a new sticker and try to use it with everyone to see what they say, but what happens when half the characters don’t understand this super bespoke sticker? Even when framed as language groups, shouldn’t there be a unique reaction per sticker? And shouldn’t they be able to learn its meaning? Future worries for a future Caelan, or not worries at all. We won’t know until we test it out!
Progress Out of Engine
Character profiles:
Two of these were already done, but Jib and I sat down on Tuesday to assign names and personalities to the characters she had drawn. This was so hard and took so long. We got through two and a half in about three hours. This is the kind of thing that I think is much easier (and better) when done slowly over time, allowing space to stew over them and take in inspiration from the world, but that’s not really afforded by our timeline. I think that process will still happen, and the characters will develop plenty in our minds as we do the sort of proto-writing required for the dialogue system prototypes, but we had to brute force our way to like 50% development instead of just laying a 5% groundwork. There’s no time for that! But we came out of it with some very cute and sweet characters! Which is a problem. You’re telling me all of these nine year olds are lovable and kind? In time, we’ll have to give them vices and bad habits, and the things that make children children along with their innocence and imagination, but for now we have some foundation to build those things off of.
Concern: I’m a bit worried about fitting these characters into our spectrums of belief. Of course we’ve assigned them beliefs and built those personalities backwards from there, but at the same time their relationships with other characters need to be determined primarily by which beliefs can be reinforced by which others, or which halves of others, rather than by narrative or dynamic. It’s half a concern and half an excitement, because I think it will be quite fun to experiment and see where players wind up after being best friends with A and chatting a bit with B and C. But I do worry that we’ll have to do a bit of rewriting, reconfiguring, etc. But hopefully thinking about it now means that we’ll be able to mitigate it a little bit!
Map:
We drew up a map of the town! This was super helpful! We had some like key areas (as simple as “a gate,” or “a hole”) with no physical context, so it was really nice to ground these in some surroundings, and to really think about the structure of the town, how we can use that in interesting, cinematic ways, and to make sure that there were enough interesting places, and enough places for interesting things to happen.
UI Wireframes:
For our UI UX class (taught by our advisor Winnie (Hi Winnie!! (Are you reading these?) ) ) we have an assignment to mockup UI for a game of our choice, and we both chose this game! We’re doing it in small steps, so this past week, Jib made two mockups for the dialogue system, one for the text bubble style, and one for the style of our original dialogue system test. I’m sure she’ll have more to say on that!
My wireframes were for the rock picking up mechanic! These were each in two parts: The UI that indicates which rocks you can actually pick up based on proximity, and the UI after you’ve pickup up a rock, where you put it into a pouch.
Proximity UI:
the proximity UI and the cursor only appear when the mouse is moved, and fade after a short time)
Sticker Highlight: Rocks in proximity turn into stickers!
Glowing Ring: Self explanatory, but the reasoning behind this is to mimic UI elements from the Wii and 3DS, which featured a lot of rings, glowy stuff, and some kind of “retro futurism.”
Pouch UI:
(the pouch UI is closed by moving the cursor away from it, the distance depending on whether or not you are dragging a rock)
Bottom Anchored: This pouch is anchored at the bottom of the screen, and has dirt on either side of it to place rocks while reorganizing. You can only keep rocks that fit within the pouch, and rocks can’t overlap.
Left Anchored: This is a taller pouch, and has physics for the rocks, which you can reorganize by taking them out and dropping them off screen, which will make them disappear.
the proximity UI and the cursor only appear when the mouse is moved, and fade after a short time)
Pouch UI:
(the pouch UI is closed by moving the cursor away from it, the distance depending on whether or not you are dragging a rock)
We showed these screens in class and got votes and feedback on them. Overwhelmingly, people were in favor of the sticker highlight proximity UI, which I agree with, and really only did the ring thing because we were required to make two for the assignment. I was surprised by the votes for the pouch UI, which leaned heavily towards the left anchored one, which was not my favored version, visually. One of our peers, Emma, said it was because the bottom anchored UI was very similar to the DS UI that Jib had made, which could be good or bad, depending on what we were going for. It was, in fact, what we were going for, so I took that as a positive piece of feedback haha. Most seemed to think that the physics idea for the left anchored UI was really fun.
Decision: You may have predicted this, but we decided to go with the bottom anchored visual, but the physics interaction. We couldn’t use the taller pouch in the middle of the screen, especially with physics, because the rock pickup range is the exact center of the screen, meaning the player would pick up a rock, and suddenly the pouch would appear over it, spraying rocks this way and that, utter tragedy. At the same time, the vertical pouch seemed sort of integral to the whole physics thing. After all, a flat, horizontal pouch could see rocks stacked all the way to the top of the screen. Ever heard of the pyramids? Ask an adult about them!! Anyways, we decided it would be pretty straightforward to just impose a hard vertical limit on what would or wouldn’t fit in the pouch, since of course in order to close the pouch, you can’t have rocks stacked to the sky like an overzealous waiter carrying water to a table of twelve on an six inch diameter tray. And keeping the ground around the pouch for organization felt nice as well, since it would allow rocks to fall around the bag without the player losing anything accidentally.
Discussions about Rock collecting:
Yeah, all we ever talk about it rocks. We had a meeting where we finalized some of the above, but also slightly planned out some of the potential future use cases for rocks, before I got really confused about how our notes were organized and then wasted a lot of time and we had to leave. In doing so, we realized that in order for the player to pick out a rock to do some sort of fun rock interaction with it, they need to be able to access their rock pouch! But right now, they can only access it when they pick up a rock from the ground! What the hell!!! And then a horrible conundrum struck. Holy moly. The rock pouch is in the same place as the DS that appears when you move the mouse. Where do we put the rock pouch? We solved this expeditiously. We put the rock pouch next to the DS. It’s a little bit strange, because you’ll have to mouse over to the left corner of the screen, then back to the center to grab a rock after the pouch opens, but maybe it’ll be okay? it’s a simple solution for the current version of the game! I don’t know if we could do it contextually, because what if the player just wants to drop a rock on the ground for no reason at all? There’s no predictable context for that. Or what if they want to use a rock when they’re in someone’s conversation proximity? Grrrr… This is making me frustrated….. It’s okay! We have an inelegant solution for now. Maybe they can mouse over their character? interesting thought…… I’ll pitch that soon…
We also discussed in-depth the one rock use case that we’re certain of, which is offering rocks at shrines! We decided that since we already will be using physics for the rock pouch, when the player drags a rock over a shrine, it will open up a little screen with a closeup on the shrine, and a single-plane physics UI to place the rock in. Awesome! We briefly discussed some others, but decided to come back to it and to brainstorm some more.
Ordered a warm blanket:
I ordered a big and warm blanket from Muji so that we can be cozy this winter. But it got delayed!
This happened last time I ordered something from Muji too… Maybe I should just go to manhattan instead.
Meetings and Espionage and Stealing
Glimmers of future structures for our dialogue system:
I know that we will have to make a better structure for writing NPC dialogue. It’s so ridonkulous to type dialogue directly into a script full of silly nested loops and stuff. In the past couple of weeks, We’ve had presentations in our spreadsheets class about how people are using spreadsheets in their own practices and lives, and two stood out as offering some direction. Nico presented a simple spreadsheet in which different columns in a dialogue’s row had different response options and response results, in which result one could comprise two columns, one specifying a variable, and the next specifying the value to add or subtract. I thought this structure could be used similarly for us, with the addition of using it to check these same variables as conditions to reach a certain dialogue. I thought this might be a bit inefficient, though, since it would lack nesting (right? Or could I parse the CSV to nest these things somehow? surely not). Then Ethan presented a similar spreadsheet, but instead of setting variables in columns, he did it in the dialogue text, using regular expressions. This would be super easy and effective for us!
Meeting with Winnie, who disagrees with Karina:
Winnie thinks that showing the body is powerful and dramatic. Perhaps she’s onto something. I worry a little bit that we bend too easily to the whims of faculty sometimes, but it is worth considering heavily whether or not we show the body at all. It also makes me wonder: do the other kids even talk about the body at first? Or has no one else seen it? Does it take some time for word to get around? More considerations that we haven’t yet considered.
Other stuff:
Watched the restoration of Angel’s Egg in theaters! Pretty cool. Not useful for thesis. The people next to me talked the whole time. They should be exiled. Find my review on letterboxd dot com
Rewatched The Boy and the Heron. Best movie ever maybe?
Started reading Tekkonkinkreet. Has some kids in it! Will surely be useful for the whole “our kids need to be imperfect and less than 100% lovable” thing.
Next Steps:
- I must finish the next dialogue system! Hoowee!!!
- I must write new dialogue for the new dialogue systems and characters!
- We must, as always, think about rocks even more. We should have a meeting specifically for brainstorming new ideas about rocks.
- Jib will draw some mockups of characters in the world to test out possible styles for characters and backgrounds!
- Jib will start implementing the base rock collecting mechanic!
- We will have a delightful Thanksgiving with our families!
eep! you found me!