Tedious, but not impossible!

The good thing about working with third party assets is that they usually have all your bases covered for creating whatever it is you want with their asset. The bad thing is that you need to dive through mountains of documentation and tutorial videos for how to use said asset if you want to get the most out of it. I had a dialogue tree system in mind for Cyrano and the more I thought about it and the more behaviors and interactions I wanted to add the more complex the system would need to be. Luckily, I had an asset called the "Dialogue System" that is popular and robust enough that will cover all my use cases. The downside is as I said above, it requires a lot of reading and trial and error. Trying to get two assets to work together is even more of a headache, double the fun, double the documentation.

I'm happy to finally be able to have gotten the hardest parts out of the way. While the dialogue won't be that hard for me to write, the minor interactions between each dialogue node will not be a piece of cake and seems like it will be quite tedious. Tedious, but not impossible!

In this test clip you can see I've revamped the look of the dialogue box and tied her interactions to the conversation as well as facial expressions to some of the player's answers. Certain dialogue choices will be positive choices, some negative and others neutral. Depending on the choices you make you will unlock naughty scenes to be played after the date or directly from the menu. You can see in the test that the positive choices unlocked the scene that shows up at the top right of the screen. I think I will make the food menu on the table a special command menu where you can choose what happens next, like ordering food/drinks or perhaps keep track of the conversations you are having with Roxanne. Finally, you will also have the option to skip right to the naughty scenes you unlock. Or perhaps clothing options will be on this menu as well.

I haven't worked out too much yet, the goal is not to overscope but deliver an interesting experience and if there is interest I can add these other features later. However, making sure the building blocks for these features are at least there from the getgo is important. It's why I build the game with VR and Flatscreen in mind.

While I am still fresh on how to use the dialogue system I think I will spend a significant amount of time over the next week or so fleshing out the dialogue tree and story. Once this story is fleshed out and written, I will make a build to have some outside opinions on story and pacing before I dive into all the additional facial blendshapes and animations I will need for the story.

So the current plan over the next few weeks will be:

• Story/Writing/Dialogue
• Playtest
• VR implementation for Dialogue System (trivial but necessary)
• Animations/Blendshapes
• Menu System
• H scenes

That's it for now!