Hello! We are Team OOPArts, currently developing Frostory.
This time, we’d like to introduce the dialogue system of our game.
At the beginning of development, we were quite inexperienced in optimizing our workflow.
We even made a very inconvenient editor and kept using it, unaware of how uncomfortable it was.
The old dialogue editor is one such example.
Old Method
First, we created a dialogue style.
A dialogue style includes data such as fonts, text colors, text appearance speed, and speech bubble images.
Separating these elements was one thing we did right back then.
Next, it was time to display the dialogue.
To display a single speech bubble, we had to input ①, ②, and ③ every time.
Here’s an example of how the text data looked back then.
In the early stages of game development, this method seemed fine.
We were busy implementing the game’s system and didn’t think the existing dialogue-writing method was bad.
However, as we started writing the story in earnest, we realized something was wrong.
We had to repeat the same input process just to display one speech bubble.
Initially, we only focused on “displaying the speech bubble.”
But the more important question was, “What steps are required to display the speech bubble?”
New Method
After changing our approach, we started by writing text data first.
The ① and ② steps from the old editor were now moved into the text data.
Now, ① and ② are automatically input based on the text data.
By inputting just one key value, the dialogue sequence is displayed in order.
When text data is written this way, the result looks like this:
Thank you for reading!