#4 Starting in Unity

Last week I said I would start work within Unity and that is exactly what I have done.

To begin with I created a brand-new project and installed the fungus plugin. Fungus allows me to create a visual novel really easily without having to code. This will save me a lot of time and effort with this project.

To begin with I thought I would start work on the user interface. To do this I created a UI panel and added 4 sliders. I made the fill colour green and the background colour light grey for now as a way to easily see if its working while I make it.

I then changed the max values to 10 rather than 1 to make it easier to adjust with fungus. I also added text on them that made it easy for the player to know what the sliders are displaying.

UI design within Unity

After this I created a flowchart using fungus and added a main menu block. On this block I added 2 commands which were both menu commands called “Start Game” and “Quit”. When the player clicks on one of these options the player will move to another block depending on their choice.

If the player chooses “Quit” they go to the quit block which has a quit command that shuts down the game. If the player chooses “Start Game” then it will set all the sliders to the starting values and the game will begin to play.

Next, I decided to start on some dialogue. This dialogue is very much subject to change in the future as I haven’t spent time working out what each character will say yet. The dialogue serves as a structure for the game.

At first, I wasn’t sure how to start the dialogue, so I asked someone for a random sentence to start it off. I was given “The beans are spoiled” and from there I began the story. I quickly moved on from the spoilt beans to talking about school.

The first block on the flowchart

I did this in order to build the world in which the game is set. This also informs the player that they are playing a character who has to go to school giving them a rough age that the character could be. Also, the character is shown to be a gamer and uses “discard” (which is named after the real-world alternative Discord) in order to talk to his friends from school.

Next week I hope to work a lot more on the dialogue and get the school day completed as well as work on how the streaming aspect of the game will function. I also want to see how I may involve Variables to link with the UI as then I can add values rather than just simply set them like I am currently.