#20 Updated speech bubbles, dialog boxes and diary.

Hi!
These past few weeks I’ve spent most of my time creating the diary system and adding notes for it, but the most exciting news are the new speech bubbles!

The biggest complaint with the demo was that at times it was hard to tell who was the speaker of which dialogue, as the old speech bubbles were just boxes on top of multiple characters’ heads. I always wanted to add comic style speech bubbles with arrows pointing to the speakers heads, but I wasn’t sure how to make that work dynamically.

The solution was surprisingly simple and only took me a few minutes to implement. All I had to do was make an arrow shaped sprite show up right above the speaking character’s head, disconnected from the dialog box itself. This allows the arrow to follow the character to the edge of the screen while the dialog box remains static – giving it that dynamic look I wanted!

Also updated, the conversation options box’s design. What do you think? Would a more solid, black box with red/ blue color text (like in the speech bubbles) work better?
I’ve also been testing different color combinations for the interaction wheel UI. After a lot of testing and asking for opinions, I’ve settled on C. What do you think?

Lastly, the diary system. This has probably been one of the most time consuming features of all, but it’s hard to imagine a Detective game without a notepad, right? As a result, this feature has been reduced in scope and is a very simplistic record of the Detective’s observations (rather than a multi-tabbed compendium as planned earlier)

I think it does the job all the same! It’s still a work in progress, and there are some issues to be sorted out still.
It’ll also contain the map, which I don’t want to reveal yet 🙂
Another cool feature: A lockpicking minigame!

A couple more UI and diary improvements to come during the rest of the month, and a bit of work on polishing the dialogues.

See you next time!
Armaan