Devlog Nov 14th - Town Dialogue

 Welcome to the first November devlog

This time we've been writing the dialogue for all the characters in the town.

As a rule of thumb, we want every character to have one (or sometimes two) longer dialogue(s) that the player will see the first time they interact with the character. In addition to this, each character will have a short dialogue snippet for repeated interactions.

For example, the first time you interact with the character in front of the Tax Office, a dialogue will play between him and the Tax Office guard.

Normally, when the player interact with a character, they will turn to face the player. This particular dialogue is set up to not do that, since the player is overhearing a dialogue, not participating.

Then, if you interact with the character a second time, he will explain what his problem is and ask the player for help. 

In the second dialogue, the character does turn to face the player

Finally, if you keep interacting with him, he'll have a one-line dialogue.

If the player tries to leave the town, they will have different options depending on who they have talked to. 

In this example, the player talked to the Farm Owner, so they can travel to the Raided Farm.

The goal is to have the town act like a hub in the game, so the player will travel to smaller areas to do various quests and fights and then return to the town. There will also be a shop eventually. You can speak with the shopkeeper (and her Ox) who are likewise stuck on this side of the road.

The player can't buy from the shopkeeper while her goods are on the cart. We'll have to wait until the road is free to buy and sell.

Since the player is going to return several times to the town, we want the place to feel inhabited and interesting. That's why we have added quite a lot of characters, and we have also drawn additional poses and expressions for them to make the dialogues more interesting. The town has it's own music track and there's a sound effect for the legion marching through.

We also drew a walking animation for Julia, allthough for now it is unused. The original plan was that Julia (and any other Party Members) would follow the player around as they explore. That would be a cool feature and help create the feeling that the party members are there with you, but it's probably not a critical feature. So this feature has been descoped for now.

Walking animations are cool! We'll probably use this eventually, so it shouldn't be wasted effort.

Getting everything set up required a number of code changes as well.

We had to set up a simple system for looping sound effects (Music was already looping, but sound effects were previously only set up to be played one time).

We now have the option of adding requirements to everything the player can interact with on the map. The requirement could be that the player must have interacted with other things first, or a Game Variable must have a certain value. Requirements can be chained together so we could for example set up that the player must either pay 100 silver or do all the sidequests to unlock a certain area.

There was a few more minor changes, improvements and bug fixes. 

Thanks for reading!

Next time, which will be November 28th, we'll add the shop to the Town. This requires us to draw an additional part of the town, we need to add currency to the game and add a menu. Talk to you then!