Devlog #2- Dialogue, UI and More Concepts!

Week 3 - 08.08.2018 

This week, we've been working on getting most of the dialogue done and put into the first scene of the game. It was important that I got it ready for testing as I'm not a writer and I want to make sure the dialogue isn't weird or unrealistic. So far, I've gotten good feedback on the dialogue but I'll have to keep working on it and adding more onto it and test it continuously. As I mentioned last week, planning out the dialogue would be easier in a flowchart format which was what I did for it. It made it easier for myself and my programming partner Zen to look at! Also, flowcharts are really satisfying to make.

During the week, we had to run some playtests which was really needed for both the writing as well as the UI and it's placement/ design. We were able to get some insight on what people thought of the game so far and what we needed to work on for the next few weeks. There were quite a few issues with the design of the UI that we knew of before the playtests but we wanted to test it anyway to see what people would say/ suggest and also so we could improve on it a lot when we were done with testing.

At the moment, it works (thank goodness) but we will need to play around with how it looks and work on the readability of it. We also need a design that will work with other scenes as we want it to be as simple to use and play as possible. With the suggestions gathered from our playtest and the ideas that we come up with from it, hopefully we'll be able to create a better looking and working UI for the dialogue! 

Something that was being worked on and will continue to be worked on was the phone. Both the UI for it and the dialogue between the main character and her friend. I've "completed" the dialogue for that but of course, as with everything else, it still needs polish and testing. We'll need to put it into the game a long with a working phone UI that looks good but also works well and is self explanatory to use. There was already some graphics for the phone that I did last year during the game-a-week class but I need to re-do it to fit with what's currently going for the game. More planning for how the phone will work in game will need to be done. Here's a sneak peak of it!! I'll try not to spoil too much :-(

Looking at this section now, a lot of the things your character says are quite similar but said in a different way. The idea behind this is that, I don't want every bit of the dialogue affecting the outcome of the game; there are parts of the dialogue that will do that but for the most part, I want the player to be able to pick what they'd want to say/ or how they'd normally say it. Hopefully, I can make the choices more believable and relatable so the players can feel more connected with the character they are playing. This section isn't a really good example but you get what I mean right?! If not, I will try to show more in the coming weeks.

Finally, I did some sketches on scenes that will be done within the next (few??) weeks. I say that because I think I may need to rearrange my priorities to get what I want done in time. These sketches helped me think of ideas on how I want the UI to possibly look so it'll be something I can play around with. Also, it helps with refining the themes and styles of the game!

I really hope to get some mock-ups of other scenes done soon but with the amount of time left, it might just be more worthwhile to really get the main dinner scene the best it can be. Next week's devlog should be more decisive and sure cause at the moment, I don't really know!!  There are so many things I want to do but there are also a lot that I need to do before I move on so... 

Anyway, this week was pretty good, I was able to work on the dialogue with little to no issues as I was able to just get words out because I knew that any issues with the dialogue would possibly be brought up during the playtesting sessions. The only main issue now and what's stressing me out a little is our scope and the things we want to get done before our mid-sem deadline vs what we need to get done before that (or what's the most reasonable thing to do). I think this will all be sorted out by the end of this week though so next week we should be more organised.

I think that's all for this week. I hope to produce more content by next week! 

Thank you for reading! (I hope the pictures aren't huge when I publish this but if they are SORRY!)

-Jo :-)