Character Animations and Dialogue Choices

Hey everyone!

Here’s what I’ve been working on recently for the Katawa Shoujo: GBA.

Character Animations

I’ve added two types of character animations:

• Character Appearance: Characters now fade in smoothly onto the scene, making their introductions feel more dynamic.
• Movement on Scene: Characters can now slide into place during dialogues or dramatic moments, adding more life to each scene.

However, working with the GBA’s hardware came with an interesting challenge:

The GBA only supports scene-wide blending for transparency effects (unless using H-Blank tricks). This means when animating character appearances with transparency, the dialogue window (which also uses blending) must be temporarily hidden.

While it’s a compromise, I think it still works well without breaking immersion. Check out the GIFs to see these animations in action!

Dialogue System with Choices

Staying faithful to the original UI is a priority, and that includes handling dialogue choices. On the GBA, I faced the challenge of fitting all options within the constraints of the screen width.

For example, if there are two responses:

• A short response.
• A longer response that doesn’t fit within a single line.

To handle this, I implemented auto-scrolling for the highlighted response. When the player selects an option that’s too long to fit on screen, the text smoothly scrolls so the entire response can be read without breaking the UI flow. This approach allows me to stay true to the simplicity of the original game while working within the GBA’s hardware limitations.