I put my game related things in this thread

[Zorafim]

Alright, I just figured out how to make and draw rooms and levels! I think I can start designing the tutorial area now.

Which has some mapping involved. I want the tutorial to take place in here:

Spoiler!

So while you'll only see it one room at a time, I want the entire experience to feel like going through this huge castle.

I'll probably design the rooms first, then try to fit them together in a coherent way later. For now, I'm just happy to be able to go from room to room. Now I can properly test each of my abilities in its own designated room.

[yoshiblue]

I like how you could recycle that to be a floating glacier, a space ship, a manta ray, ect.

[Zorafim]

Oh I'm getting good at recycling

[qoxolg]

Making games the efficient way is all about recycling! Did you know I only use 4 rock walls in my game so far? Some I even use as a floor, because, why not? The smart thing to do is to make modular components that can be combined in endless ways. Sure it’s gonna get you some more drawcalls, but CPU is usually the least performance worry for your game to begin with. You can always merge some of your bigger assets together later on, if that’s ever gonna be an issue.

for the dash attack, I vote for a lunge. Also, will the dash attack make you stop running?

[Zorafim]

One problem I'm having is that my wall running animation is my normal dash animation tilted upward. Because I'm doing the rotation in code, that messes up a whole bunch of other code. So that's one case of going lazy causing more problems than it solves.
That's still giving me problems too. Now my character runs off when she jumps for some reason, despite my finally fixing it so that she jumped correctly. And it turns out she clips through the ceiling when that's done indoors, so I have to fix that in the future too.

I haven't decided exactly how I want the dash attack to work. Maybe I'll just make some notes on it now, and wait until I have some enemies before settling.
Originally, I wanted to slash through the enemy and stop behind them so I could combo them. But that seems like a lot of work for something I'm not sure will have the best gameplay. For now I'm assuming I'll want to keep running, but I'm not sure. It depends how I want to build my levels.

[Zorafim]

Spoiler!

Dialogue!

[qoxolg]

Haha, and thats where the gameplay part is starting to become time consuming, depending on how well documented Unity is. UE4 has lots of documentation, but the important and mundane stuff is very poorly explained. I've easily spent two hours in figuring out why the laser of my enemy seemed to go in some random direction that was not forward. Eventually I solved it with a different solution that works but isn't optimal.

Hmm dialog! you better also add face pictures to it like mine. I always preferred it when the more old school RPG's showed off the emotion of the person talking using a simple picture. But you can't really have a dialog system without a quest/objective system driving it Mine is a beautiful type of spaghetti! But it works quite well and can be completely build using just Excel. I even got an objective function working, including a quest marker that can point you in the right direction.

I am not gonna add a mini-map/radar to my game, because I find it highly distracting in almost all games I play. With PSO2 I even reached the point where I hardly look at the graphics on the screen and simply play the game by watching the mini-map, because it's more efficient. My objective marker can only be seen when the objective gets updated for like 5 seconds and when you summon a 'navigation screen'.

My current quest structure is:
- Quests
- Quests lock/unlock the doors in the related level(s).
- Quests have one or more Objectives.
- Objectives are bound to levels and have a location in that level.
- Objectives have one or more 'events'.
- These events can be: Enemy spawns, object spawns or dialog. Enemy spawns and dialog use an overlap volume to actually trigger. What I spawn is that volume and a link to the data table that contains the enemy spawn or dialog data.
- Killing all enemies in a spawn can trigger: next objective, another spawn, object spawns and door unlocks.
- Picking up an item can trigger the next objective.
- Dialog can trigger the same stuff as killing an enemy spawn.

[Zorafim]

I think I have the data structure behind the dialogue all figured out. I'm going to have one object in each room with something to say. I just want her to have something to say to the player each room, as a way to kinda interact with her. Or to get a clue for each room. For instance, the first one will have the writing "Press A to speak with Levia", and then she'll introduce herself and tell you to go right. Then for each room after that, some writing on the wall will tell you how to do something, and speaking with her again will go into more detail or have more flavor.
The only issue with that is the room with Zorael, where I'll have actual dialogue between the two characters. That'll be a bit more complicated, but I seem to be good at stuff like that.

Of course the face will be necessary, and I'll add it when I work on art again. For now it's a bit intimidating, so I'm going to work more on making rooms and adding dialogue first. I don't know about adding different emotion. I kinda like the mysterious storybook feeling some of the early Final Fantasies had where they just have an emotionless face.
But if drawing faces isn't too hard, I may consider it. Perhaps as a form of polish.

[stukasa]

What I did in my game was draw a blank face for each character as a template, then drew the expressions last. That way you don't have to draw the entire face for each expression. You're only re-drawing the eyes, nose, and mouth. Just a thought, in case you want to save time/effort. Alternately, you could commission one of the fine artists on DA or elsewhere to draw the character portraits/expressions for you (unless the entire project must be made by you from scratch).

[Zorafim]

Nah, I'm only doing the art out of necessity. But there is one big advantage to doing it.
If I were to get an artist, I wouldn't be able to put my own flavor into the character. It would be that artist's interpretation of the character, and not my own pure interpretation.

Still. Doing new things is always intimidating. It might take me a while to get to that part.