Log 02

My goal in June is to get all the logistics out of the way so I can finally author the actual play, and so far I’m not quite there yet! This time, I was focusing on Dialogue Boxes. I mentioned last time that I had a Dialogue Box system that made me want to die every time I looked at it, so I rewrote that. Into something that, hopefully, does not elicit that same response. Creating and destroying dialogue boxes is much easier now, and there are nice animations for it. I have yet to fully integrate it back into the stage play or make it look pretty, though. And I’ll need to tie it to the actual dialogue that is being spoken.

That’s all. No pictures this time.

Next Up

Integrating the Dialogue Box into the stage play, and updating the dialogue timeline so that box items follow the characters rather than having to define positions per line of text. (I’ll probably create an extra object that aligns to the Correct Character for this).

Next up is figuring out the lighting setup. I’ve been operating with a single spotlight for too long.

Things that I need to fix with dialogue boxes:

• they don’t need an x/y value anymore, so let’s just get rid of the field
• the importer should also take that into account
• make the length of dialogue tracks shorter because they cannot overlap Things that I should figure out with lighting:
• we can probably get away with 3-4 spotlights total
• figure out what other lights are needed
• lots of tweaking to make it look good. Because lighting is hard.

Also I should create placeholder transforms for each actor that can be set at the beginning of each scene, so that spotlights and dialogue go to the correct places