Let's kick off by saying, Hi.
So, this is the first dev log for this game on this site. I felt the need to reach out to other sites besides Twitter and Reddit, so here it is...
What I have been working on for the past week or so was a dialogue system. I was in two minds of what I wanted it all to look like, how I wanted the player to react to the conversations, whether to have free-floating dialogue boxes or draw it in the GUI at the bottom of the screen.
Problem #1
To begin with, the text was wrapping weirdly due to displaying it one letter at a time. GameMaker has a number of built-in functions when it comes to finding a strings dimensions, but it just wasn't doing it for me. I also couldn't get the dialogue box to draw to the sizes I wanted based on how many lines of text there were.
This is what I came up with and it doesn't look good. Not only that, but I felt no emotion from the text.
This leads us to solution number 1...
Solution #1
So my solution to this was to draw the dialogue box at the bottom. This would let me have a one size fits all dialogue box style of dialogue box. Not only that, but it gave me the opportunity to give the characters a bit of emotion when they talk. This is where the portraits came in.
Is it a cheap way to make conversations humorous? Hell if I know, but I just felt better in general when making it and seeing it in action.
That is it for now. New logs will appear when I have new content. Have a good one