We would like to talk a bit about how the game's dialogue system works. When it comes to dialogues, if you divide the screen with horizontal lines, you can see dialogues appearing in three different rows: top, middle, and bottom. Each of these rows also has four different pockets. As shown in the images below, characters can speak from separate rows, and they can also speak from adjacent pockets in the same row.
This game, like many story-based games, reads dialogues from a .txt file. Besides the dialogue sentences, there are some simple codes written in the .txt file to determine which character is speaking in which emotion and in which pocket of which row. Let's provide an example from a dialogue paragraph within the .txt file.
DB04; T, Paintings, B, PC desk
Saye (Desperate): I tell myself not to think about it, but it's really hard. I still can't believe I left the software company I co-founded with Niko like this.
Kedi (Sleepy): ... ...
Saye: Niko owned 40% of the company, I had another 40%, and an external lawyer controlled the remaining 20% for financial and legal matters. We were quite successful but...
Saye: But terrible things happened. I can't stay there for even a minute anymore. There are three reasons for this.
Kedi (Dull): ... ...
Saye (Sad): First, I was never seen or treated as a human during our partnership.
Let's examine all the codes one by one. DB04 indicates that this is the 4th dialogue paragraph in the sequence. The letters T, B, M represent the abbreviations for Top, Bottom, and Mid, indicating in which row the dialogue will appear. Tables and PC desk specify which background image will be used in that dialogue.
For each character speaking in that paragraph, we need to include a layout code (T, M, B) and a background image code. If we don't include them, the program will generate a warning. Unity reads and places all these codes from the .txt file into the game.
Now, let's talk about the names. These are quite self-explanatory. Saye is our main character, and kedi (means cat in Turkish) is our cat :) The emotion names in parentheses next to them encode the emotions with which those sentences are spoken. We plan to provide more details about the emotions in the next blog post.
If you have any questions about how the system works, we'd be happy to answer them. Thank you for your interest in Anomalistic Revolution. See you in the next blog post.