Devlog July 11 - Cutscenes

  Welcome to the first July devlog!

Let's pick up right were we ended last time. With a new character, Uncle Decimus

Uncle Decimus is the owner of the farm where our story starts

He is speaking with another new character, the Augur Thecla

Theclas arrival at the farm is in many ways what starts off our story

Thecla arrived at the farm by walking in during a cutscene. So let's talk about cutscenes.

Cutscenes in video games are scenes that are not interactive. It's like a little movie where things play out without player input. In our game, there's going to be many little mini cutscenes. For example, in the current game intro, we've set it up with three steps:

1. First there's a dialogue between Marius and Decimus.

2. Once the player has clicked through this, Thecla will walk into the scene.

3. Once her walking animation has finished, a second dialogue starts.

In the Unity Editor, the cutscene looks like this

Each object (StartDialogue1, MoveTheclaIn etc) represents a step in the cutscene. The individual objects can then be further customised to set up what should happen

The number 0 in front of each element is a delay (in seconds). In this particular cutscene, there is no fixed delay on any of the elements so the delays are all 0.

The WaitForPrevious is simply an instruction that the cutscene should wait for the previous elements(s) before moving on. This is especially useful for things like dialogue or other popups that require player input, since the game cannot know how quickly the player will continue.

Let's take a look at a Dialogue element

This is the same dialogue as the first screenshots in this post

In each dialogue part we set up which character is speaking, as well as their pose and expression. Some of these new characters only have one pose or one expression for now(in which case there is nothing to choose from). We're planning to draw more poses and expressions so we can give this dialogue a more correct feel.  

Let's also see a Move Character element

We've snipped this image so a bit of the map is visible. With the current instruction, Thecla will move 3 tiles left, then 1 tile up, then 1 tile left. This places her right in front of Decimus (Where she's standing in the first screenshots in this post)

 

This is a very simple element with just a set of movement instructions. Since the cutscene is waiting for the Move Character element, it will continue only once all the instructions have been carried out.

Lastly we want to mention that we also reworked all the existing things that can happen with interacting on the map so they can also be triggered as part of a cutscene. So now cutscenes can trigger things like e.g. receiving items, starting combats, travelling to a different map etc.

We considered adding a video of the intro cutscene to this blog post, but there was too much dialogue text and we decided it didn't really work in a video format. So instead we decided to pull back the curtain a little and show some screenshots from the editor. It's a bit of an experiment. If people are interested in seeing how the sausage is made, we'll continue doing it, otherwise we'll go back to mostly showing the final results.

Feel free to comment below about your preferences or anything you like.

Thanks for reading this update! The next update will be on July 25th. Talk to you then!