Reynard Devlog #7 – Dialogue System Reynard Can Talk!
Hello again. As I mentioned in last week devlog my next mission was dialogue system.
Dialogue system
I tinkered a bit with Nodecanvas and their system, which has a lot of possibilities, but in the end I made my own. It’s really basic for now but Reynard can talk to you without problems. I will extend it in next days to do more things. For now our system reads text files in which it searches for new line (when you press return/enter). Then in the next step loads them into box. You will also have possibility to skip dialogue lines by simply pressing right button or you can just wait and text will automatically write on screen.
Box is made with help of unity’s UI canvas and TextMesh Pro. We use TextMesh Pro because is simply better than default Text from unity. With TextMesh Pro you have much more customization and much clearer fonts if you zoom camera really close. You can get it for free from unity asset store.
How we start Conversation
We can trigger system in two ways. One is by proximity. If Reynard comes close enough to Phoenix as you can see in video, dialogue will start automatically. There is also possibility to run dialogue only once. You will have to pay close attention in the game as you never know when is the last time when some NPC will speak to you.
The second way is that you need to press a button to start dialogue. You can see that in this week video when Reynard comes close to the house and you can see exclamation mark above it. If you press right button dialogue will start or you can turn away and never know what secrets you just missed. Also we can select if player is allowed to move once the dialogue has stared or hid movement is frozen
There are also some basic sound effects when text scrolls and don’t worry they will be improved as we decided to put them in few hours before this devlog was released.
This is all for this week devlog. Come back next week for new info about Reynard.
This week we are changing colors of sprites in Reynard. Benefit is that we can change colors of whole sprite or change only selected colors which we want to change, so we can have even more diverse dungeons as mentioned in previous Devlog.
Shaders?
This is achieved in two ways. First is with shaders and second with custom tool. When I started looking intro shaders this week I was confused and I still am, but I managed to write one really simple shader that changes color of whole sprite. Thank you youtube videos! Maybe you remember this effect from Binding Of Isaac as they use them on elite enemies to distinct them from regular one.
Chaning Colors With Shaders
Palette Swap
But that wasn’t everything I was doing this week. I also tried to find way to recolor sprites and here is result.
Palette Swap
With this tool you create palette from sprite and then you can change every color that is in you sprite. So we can easily recolor something without opening pixel edit or aseprite as we are using both for art. And you believe me I made some spooky looking reynards with it.
Hit Effect
Also we added the hit effect to Reynard. Now when he is hit by the enemy or he takes damage he flashes and some particles fly around. Flashing is again made with the help of shaders and particles as name says is made with particles effects in unity. Shader just changes color to what we select and then with few lines of code we just set how many time he flashes in a given time frame.
Hit Effect
Right now I’m working on some shaders for desert map and I have to finish dialogue system. Update on that will come in future blog posts so stay tuned for updates.
Reynard Devlog #3 – World Map
Hello, my name is Boštjan and i think it’s my first time writing here about Reynard.
Unity and 2D tiles
So lets talk a little bit about Unity and 2D tiles. When we started developing reynard we decided to use Super Tilemap Editor, because we figured out that it is simply better than tools that came with Unity. After deciding what tools to use and searching for tilesets there was annoying problem with Unity. Anybody that uses unity for making 2D games with tiles has faced that – random rendering vertical or horizontal lines when playing the game between tiles. I admit it we made few mistakes while figuring out how to fix it. If you use same tile editor as us is really simple to fix this. You must just extrude 1px with tile atlas editor. Other solution is that you add 1px to you tile. I was doing that with program called Pyxel. You just resize tile to desired size and center it. In our case new tile size was 18×18 because we use 16×16 tiles and then you just copy the edge pixel in all directions around tile. After that you just set size of your boxes in unity sprite editor to 16×6 and your problem should be fixed.
Pyxel Edit
Reynard World map
Now to our world map. I wont tell you how much islands or areas there will be, but you can see in video that for now we have prototyped 4 islands in 3 different biomes. Using Super Tilemap Editor for doing that is really easy and it’s just like painting in Microsoft Paint. I have a quicklapse of doing that so if anybody is interested in that video let me know in comments bellow. When Reynard comes into the vicinity of selected buildings you will see big exclamation mark. This indicated that there you can do something. For now I only log to Unity console some strings if you press attack button but in next week there should be dialogue system instead of me just logging stuff. For Reynard i use sprites that Filip drawed and showed to you in previous Devlog.
So what is next for world map. Working dialogue system, maybe some random spawning enemies, more diverse tilesets, some shaders for the water part and particle effects for islands, because as for now there is only snowing particle system and you can see clouds on grass island. We want to make game looking more interesting and not just bland few colors on ground. Shaders and Particle system will help with that.
So this is all from me for now. Stay tunned for new update next friday.
