Most real-time tactical games I get annoyed that my dudes are idiots and require too much micromanagement (coughBattlefleetGothicArmadacough), but in Aliens: Dark Descent I get annoyed that I can't micromanage them.
If you want to silently take out a lone xeno, you have to make sure that every marksman in your team has a suppressed rifle, or one without will take the shot and wake up the whole hive.
2 notes
·
View notes
Lancer Tactics dialogue layout crisis of faith
(from this month's backer update)
Every so often, I'll run into something in development that eats away at me until it pushes me to a crisis of faith and I have a breakdown, burn down a bunch of work, and build something better from the ashes. These are moments of transformation and we're almost always able to come out the other side with something much better than what we started with.
This all sounds very dramatic until you take a step back and see the issue in question is just, like, the layout of a menu. But if medieval priests were able to have schisms over angels on pins I can have strong feelings about graphic design, dammit!
This month's episode revolved around how we're doing character dialogue. For reference the plan was to do a standard 4-slot visual-novel talking heads layout. I call it a 4-slot because there's usually four positions that characters can stand; two on the left, two on the right:
I had it ingame, and it was working. But... something felt off. Do you see the difference between every one of the above examples and this?
It's all about perspective, baby.
Answer: all the character art in those examples are drawn at a slight angle so they can be flipped back and forth to be made like they're looking at each other.
Trying to do this with the perspective we chose early — straight on — makes for a chorus line of weirdos who are looking directly into your soul as they ostensibly chat with each other. Credulity is strained; the illusion of these puppets interacting in the same space is paper-thin.
(I was skeptical of choosing this perspective for this reason, but we ultimately went with it to make the customizable assets in the portrait maker easier to fit together)
We tried a bunch of different layouts, but they all at least one of these problems:
they'd stare into your soul while ostensibly directing comments elsewhere.
they felt like text messages; this would be fine if that's what we were going for, but we wanted something that could represent face-to-face conversations. (Tactical Breach Wizards was able to pull this style off because they had little 3D dioramas to go along with it)
or, most damning of all, they felt like zoom calls.
So, my heart aflutter and spirit in want, I spent a day doing a research dive into various dialogue layouts (bless the Game UI Database!) to see if any other games had managed to pull this character art perspective off. I ended up with this massive non-chronological taxonomic tree:
(fullsize here)
The type of layout that particularly caught my eye was this style where each character had their own little box. These layouts borrow a concept from comic books called "closure" where the space and time between characters are left blank. Freed from the constraints of trying to simulate a single space, these layouts allow the reader to fill in the blanks with something that feels more true-to-life than anything we'd be able to render ourselves.
I was especially impressed with the dynamism of Tales of Symphonia and The World Ends With You; rather than sticking to single slots they would animate the entire panels moving around to indicate motion an relative position of characters.
So we threw out the old code and copied them. Here's what we've come up with:
We'll be able to have portraits interact, like smacking each other (I felt like a kid hitting two action figures together, lol)
We can also apply effects like princess-leia-holograms and full-screen "lighting" effects like warning banners:
Carpenter and I came up with a number of arrangements that the portraits can smoothly transition between:
I've also implemented support for choices during a dialogue, potentially leading to branching paths.
Overall, I feel SO much better about this system than our initial designs. It might feel a little more cartoony, but I think we're making a cartoony game so that's not a problem.
Whew. We bit a lot off to chew with this project. I feel like I just made a second visual novel game engine inside of the first. Fingers crossed that it all ends up worth it.
213 notes
·
View notes
Multiple grapple groups! Grappling somebody who's already grappling cleanly incorporates the whole mess into the growing polycule. I've set it so you can lift grappled units up only one elevation step higher than yourself; they get scraped off and left behind if you try to move them up anything steeper.
I am very much looking forward to people abusing this and making giant mech katamaris to roll around the map.
253 notes
·
View notes