I’ve been revamping the dialogue UX recently. Is this the most pressing thing to be working on? No. But I needed a break from making missions to be able to step back and look at what I have so far with fresh eyes. It also coincided nicely with some work that Cel and I are doing auditing and updating our existing character portraits. Since the main use for these portraits is dialogue, it made a lot of sense to do this now.
I did a fair amount of UX research, looking through dozens of game’s dialogue screens. The main debate was between a visual novel style where you have 4 full length characters standing behind a shared text box, vs something we called the “side by side” where characters are anchored on the sides of the screen with a text box in the middle. The crux of the debate was whether we wanted full length portraits which would show off more costume and body language, or to have something tighter cropped to the face to potentially support animated facial expressions. In the end we took inspiration from some old Fire Emblem games, and went with the tighter cropped faces and paired them with some classic word bubbles. I think it came out really well.
I have planned and scoped out a feature to add motion accents and sprite emotes like you see in visual novels, but that is for a later day.
The other big feature this month was the campfire menu. Our pre-battle menu was getting overloaded, and we needed to have a place to do all of your between-battle stuff, like class promotions, exploring character relationships, and maybe do a bit of shopping. So we came up with the Campfire menu as a place to kick your boots off and relax a bit between the hectic demands of battle. This lead to a more significant campaign development. The original plan was to have the chapter order be completely fixed, and we would jump the player back and forth between our two main parties every few missions. But with the advent of this new menu, it made sense to make campaign progress a bit more flexible. There will still be checkpoints where both campaigns have to reach a certain mission before either can progress further, but otherwise the player is at their leisure to play either campaign in whatever order they want.
Some other features from this month were:
New playable characters & portraits
Visual updates for many existing portraits
4 or 5 new missions are now playable (ugly but playable)
Improved grid rendering to help performance on large maps.
Removed a bunch of unused fonts that were bloating the build.
Moving ahead we have a good month of development coming up. Cel and I are going to start in on the dialogue portraits in earnest and if we get time (or need a break) do an audit on the unit sprites and start designing the advanced tier classes. I am going to go back to mission building and try and get most of the Alto missions into the same playable but ugly state.
Until then.