Posted March 18, 2021 by Amy-V-M
Hello, everyone! This is Amy, and I'm back with another update from the technical side of development. I'm happy to announce that the dialogue system I've been developing is now complete! The last step was to integrate it with Anthony's character controller, so that it would be triggered by interaction with specific NPCs instead of simply pressing a button in the blue void you usually see in my demos.
Each individual character's dialogue is passed to the dialogue manager when the player collides with that character. When the player exits the collision, the character data is set to null, meaning they cannot initiate a conversation unless they are standing right next to an NPC.
Another thing you've probably noticed is that there are directions displayed in the upper left corner of the screen now. Before I added those, the other members of the engineering team were not sure what the controls for the dialogue system were. To me, it was intuitive to press T, short for "talk", to initiate conversation, and to press enter to keep scrolling. However, when the others were reviewing my work, it quickly became apparent that it wasn't quite so intuitive for everyone else. As a solution to that problem, I made this text display.
Of course, everything you see here is still far from final. After we finish building and present our demo, we may change the controls if we find out that a different set of keys is more intuitive to play-testers. But for now, the written instructions will get the point across.