Dana Callista Lexa 🏳️‍⚧️

Something I've been working on behind the scenes (that is now: in front of the scenes? in the scenes?) is a push for educational/how-to resources on Game Developer. The site used to have GameCareerGuide (which it still kind of does, and will again, etc.) but I'm starting up this initiative now, with resources that I want to put out into the world.

Mars, who works on the Yarn Spinner tool I'm so fond of (and use in basically all of my projects) did a PHENOMENAL job making this information accessible and useful (and frankly, fun to read).

We're going to do a lot more of this style of piece -- in fact, I'm compiling a big ol' list of free engines/game making tools as we speak. If you have a favorite, send it along! I want good resources to get in everyone's hands (and eyes? ok, whatever metaphor you like there.)

hey it's the rare opportunity for me to share something that isn't a huge spoiler (i'm saving a lot of context-specific stuff until i can finally 'reveal/announce' the game)

so, i've been working a lot on upgrading the dialog rendering, and that means lots of little number tweaks that make the most important part of a story-driven game shine: displaying text in fun and intuitive ways!

what this means for the gif above is my super important design goal for speech bubbles to always feel contextually appropriate!

when i first designed the dialog system (heavily adapted from peyton burnham's fantastic tutorial series) i wanted to make a system that felt like dynamic speech bubbles drawing out alongside the text. this was already shown off in the teaser video i released back in october 2021, but i made some tweaks to the visual presentation since then to make them a bit more round (i just like the shape ok).

the text boxes also adapt to display a tail if coming from a character portrait (or, and this isn't shown in the gif, but i can place them in the world & originating from characters, too!)

the latest addition is little nametags for important characters, like our protagonist astra. but because of how dynamic the speech bubbles are, i wanted to make sure that they only displayed when it made visual sense to do so. and you can see that in action, especially as astra's distressed ellipses draw in... as soon as the bubble grows to a size that displaying a nametag makes sense, it fades in. otherwise, for little exclamations & other short text, it remains off.

literally the tiniest detail, but every detail needs development time to figure out, so i felt i'd share~

//Start is called before the first frame update

//Update is called once per frame

when i was in college i took an unelective game development class that taught unity to students. the final assignment was to create "duck hunt" from scratch (the irony is not lost on me). i wrote some code that would make the duck change directions every 500ms or so and i wrote the script to kill the duck when it was clicked. i didn't understand OOP very well yet, but one of the requirements was to instantiate an object, so i put some conditional logic on the update method that would instantiate a new Duck() if the current one was dead.

the result of this was that, upon killing the first duck, 60 ducks would infinitely spawn per second, flooding the screen and filling the heap like a cosmic horror emerging to exact it's revenge.