An important part of designing a game is to always revisit old features. One that needed some improvements in the dialogue system. In the past it was a simple box where you could select some options to interact with a character. For those that have played, you might remember unity chan sitting somewhere asking for your help and giving information about the world. This is rather simplistic, and with the new system, it has become a lot nicer. Below there will be a step-by-step showcase of how it has improved to look and feel a lot more immersive and prettier.

Audio

The audio was the first thing I wanted to add since I've noticed that people tend to ignore dialogue more often if it is not voiced. I made some TTS dialogue which you can easily do yourself as well at TTSMP3 if you'd like, and I'm sure there are many other services that provide similarly. This is of course not the end goal but it works great for testing out the implementation without hiring a voice actor and going through all the effort of recording the lines.

Animations

Hooking up animations was fairly easy, and the nice thing is that you don't always need to use them. If you don't specify one it just will continue with the idling animation.

Visual improvements

The UI was also changed in the newer version as the old one had a much more outdated style for how dialogues are designed. The new version allows for much more screen space to be taken by actual visuals of the game and less focus on the big box. This is also a good change because, with the implementation of voices, the text serves as subtitles instead.

I also created another NPC for testing these features that you can find somewhere in the world:

Future plans:

Although the changes are quite nice, it does not include everything we wanted. As for some final adjustments, once we have a working questing system, we'd like to link the two together so that you require items or conditions to use certain dialogue options. As well as other small functionalities like buying from vendors or brawling with an enemy.

As a note, these changes are not yet live for testing as we want our updates to be more substantial and each one having a large impact on the game's state. There will be a major update soon so keep your eye on it!