#5 Character Introduction

This week I have been focusing mostly on writing dialogue for introducing all the main characters in the game.

I started off by creating 4 characters in unity using the fungus plugin, then naming them all the names I had come up with a few weeks ago. I gave them all a description but haven’t given them any portraits yet since I have yet to do any artwork.

After setting up these characters, I moved on to the conversation. I started off by having the character arrive at school and bump into Greg (one of the main characters). Greg asks the player “How’s it going?” and then the player has a choice. The player is given 2 options, one of which is a “polite” answer while the other is literal and could be considered rude.

If the player goes with the “Nice” option, then it sparks a conversation with Greg about how he is bullied by Richard as well as increase the players social score by 2 making it 7/10. If the player chooses the “Not Nice” option, then they have an awkward silence.

This type of choice I want to include throughout the game as it gives the player something to do while most visual novels have very little player interaction.

After meeting Greg, Richard joins the conversation. Here the player sees Richard make fun of Greg and act like best friends with the player. This sets up an interesting dynamic that could play out later in the game.

Finally, Rachel joins the conversation by asking what the other characters are taking about. This gives the impression to the player that Rachel is insecure and feels left out. This is quickly followed by Greg, replying with a stutter implying he has feeling for Rachel. Rachel dismisses it though as Greg being “the same as always” inferring that Greg has felt like this for some time already.

After this the player is once again given a choice. This time to either engage with the conversation or simply head to class.

At this point I realised that if I was going to increase the social slider it can’t be linked to the previous decision. That is because the way that the decision changed the slider was by setting the slider value to either 7 or 3 depending on what choice the player made. But now if the player chooses an option that would increase this score it would make the previous decision ineffective.

I spent a while trying to link the values to variables, but I didn’t know how to make the slider value equal the variable value, so I decided to go with a different approach. I made a copy of the current block and made the flowchart branch instead of following a more linear approach.

New branching flowchart (The school day block is temporary)

While this may work for now, I am worried that in the future I may run into issues with the flowchart simply getting too large. I am likely to use multiple flowcharts in order to simplify this in the future but if I find an easy way to link the variables and UI I will most likely switch to that instead.

Finally, I finished the day with either going to class and then home or having the bell ring, heading to class, and going home. This means that next week I can work on how the player can research games as well as start to stream. Overall, I am happy with this week’s progress as I have set up the world and introduced all of the characters.