Got trapped in a hyperfocus hole today and spent like five hours collecting and organizing a dialogue UI tree. It's obviously not chonological evolution but I thought it was interesting to see the links between different UI patterns.
This looks fascinating and I have saved it for future reference.
Thank you for your service. π«‘
What does "slot" refer to in "4-slots" and the two "Lost Slots" branches?
In a lot of the "visual novel" style and their related styles, there's usually four spots for characters to stand.
An inventive example that always stuck with me is Inscryption's talking cards speaking through their card names
Oh that is very cool, I'd forgotten. Added that to my own references, thanks!
its so neat to see these all organized like this
...it took me this long to realize Path of Radiance stuck so closely to the VN style
I feel like the top middle branch (Steven Universe & al.) should be closer to the text messages area, since they feel very inspired by that mobile phone design.
I could see that! I decided to put them up there because I felt like the full speaker portraits were a stronger visual element than the text message bubbles + their resemblance in layout to Hades et al (it's the same thing with just +1 speaker). But taxonomies and groupings like this are heavily dependent on that sorta judgement call and other interpretations are valid.
This is very nitpicky but WTWTLW actually has two different types of these; the vignettes are "any illustration will do" but the character conversations are focused on the character speaking, with light animation (although there's only ever one speaker so it doesn't change the view, but still it's speaker-focused and not an arbitrary image)
Nice, thanks for the nitpick! I vaguely remembered illustrated scenes and didn't double check for more examples of dialogue so must've gotten those memories crossed.
if you follow up on this in more depth in the future, I'd love to see it!
This is really cool!!! I love how you can see what gameplay concerns were emphasized in each too ^β^
Yeah that's the part I think is gonna be most useful β having references on hand for being able to say "ok this game wants to emphasize these parts, how have other games handled that concern?"
