Development Update 2 - Maps & Dialogue

Been a minute since my last update! Trying to move home and it's knocked me for a bit of a loop, but I'm still carving out time for the game. Since the last update I've shifted focus to some elements that weren't very prominent before: a world map and dialogue. But before that- I did mention some UI updates last time...

I've remade the ATB metres to match the art style of the game better. The ATB metres and their icons are one of the only art assets I make from scratch, and I'm pretty happy with how they've turned out here. There are extra telegraph icons for different special damage types, and a flashing display to signify 'interruptible'.

World Map

Using the really excellent tiles sold by Itchabop I've started work on a world map. It's quite fun to figure out how to do grid based movement after making everything analogue elsewhere. An unexpected source of complexity was writing maps with multiple entrances. In the previous demo, maps might have multiple exits, but the player's origin is the same place every time. I had a solution for this before but it revolved around using the same player object and moving them between scenes- that doesn't work out now since the world map player isn't the same as the dungeon player, and neither of them appears in combat scenes. Very happy to get something that worked, and even tried out using runtime sets which I've often seen spoken about but never tried myself.

Dialogue

In my last big Unity project, Wizard's Congress, I spent a lot of time getting to grips with Pixel Crusher's Dialogue System for Unity, which is a really big, dialogue system that allows for a lot of branching paths and logic. It's excellent, but very big and very involved, so up until now I've just been getting by with very simple dialogue boxes in the overworld. One of my big goals for the next demo, however, is to re-incorporate stuff from Wizard's Congress.

I've been able to recycle most of my prefabs and scripts from WC, including a cludgy framework I wrote for scripting NPC movement and action. NPCs can now move, patrol, hop on the spot, turn in all cardinal directions and face the player when spoken to. I'm really happy with how well everything came through from the old project, like getting an old bike out of storage and finding it's still in perfect working order.

Next time I'm hoping to work on some rewards for combat, i.e money, and ways to spend it!

Please look forward to it!