Garden 2 April updates

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The second playtest

The second playtest took place in early April, it featured all of the playable content that was planned for the game. A separate post about the test can be found here.

Character sprites

As I began to shift more focus on building the storytelling in the game, I needed characters to tell the story, which meant it was time to create some sprite assets. Most of the characters retained their design from Garden: Urada Chapter, so the design process itself required only a little bit of sketching. The sprites used the main character's sprite as a base, with each character having a unique silhouette and color scheme. Most of the characters have only idle sprites for now, as I'm figuring out which kind of sprites each character requires for the story.

The sprites of the main cast.

Dialogue

Another key feature of storytelling is dialogue during cutscenes and when the player interacts with NPCs (non-player characters). I wanted to try to make a system where the dialogue text comes from an external file so altering the dialogue lines does not require more than just quickly updating the file in Unreal. I did some research on the matter and found some decent tutorials on how to implement the system.

Based on the tutorials, I created a sheet that was imported to Unreal as a csv file and from there the engine created a data table. Each dialogue line belongs to a conversation, so the NPC can pick a set of dialogue lines with just the conversation's index number.

The dialogue sheet.

The NPCs would then go through the data table and pick up dialogue lines by a name that matches their own. The dialogue shows in the dialogue box advancing to the next line of the conversation and ending the dialogue once the last line of conversation is reached. The plan is for the NPCs to advance into further conversations when certain conditions are met, for example when the player completes a quest the conversation variable changes from 1 to 2 which would cause conversation 2 to play instead of 1.

The dialogue box in the game when interacting with a BaseNPC.

Next up is creating the NPCs and looking into how cutscenes work in the engine, most likely through the use of level sequences.