Devlog march 13th - Decimus cutscene and Forest Village dialogues

  Welcome to the first devlog of March!

We have been continuing work on cutscenes and dialogues. We had a bit of leftover work on the villain cutscene from last time and then moved on to the next cutscene.

Look! We're back on the farm.

The tree and gravestone is off to the side of the farm area

Looks like Decimus has packed and prepared for a trip.

This cutscene is mostly to catch us up on what's happening with uncle Decimus while Marius and his companions are off adventuring.

After this cutscene, we turn back to Marius' group. In this section, they can travel between several areas, including an area we call the Forest Village.

Not too much has changed since last time we showcased the Forest Village.

We have previously drawn the Forest Village and the inhabitants, but we only gave them very basic dialogue. We have now written more dialogues, explaining to the player what kind of place this is. 

The guard will address the group as soon as they arrive.

The Centaur Oracle is a sort of leader of the town and gives Marius his next quest.

They might also have some more information about the enemies in the game.

That's all about cutscenes and dialogues for now.

We also did some programming this period. We already had a black screen that fades in when travelling to a new area to make the transition feel smoother. Now it is possible to set up this fade in or fade out during cutscenes as well.
For example, the one cutscene is set up to start with a black screen and then the environment fades in after a couple of dialogue lines.
Another example is that some cutscenes fades slowly out before we return to the normal gameplay.

A peek behind the curtain: This is how the Decimus cutscene is set up in Unity. It has 4 dialogue sections with Decimus moving or turning in between and also for a fade in and a fade out.

We also updated our save system so we can now save any map changes that is made. That means that if the player interacts with something on a map that causes some changes (that could be things such as walls disappearing, characters changing places etc.) we save that information in the save system. So if the player saves their game, exits and then comes back to continue playing, the changes are preserved.

This also allows us to set up interactions where the player interacts with something that affects a different map than the one the player is currently on. We always planned to make this work, but didn't find time to implement it. We decided to do it now because we're jumping so much between maps in these cutscenes.

That's all for now. Next time, which is on March 27th, we'll write some dialogue for when the player returns to the town (At this point in the game, the player has some freedom to visit different areas in whatever order they want).
Then, we'll write a new cutscene with a few new characters.

Talk to you then!