Weekly devlog! I come bearing GIFs

Hello all! I'm excited for this devlog because I have GIFs to show. I know this looks like a visual novel, but it's going to be very open world. This is just the intro to set up the story. The next thing I'm going to work on is a clickable map icon in the upper left hand corner that lets you explore locations in any order you want. Also, note that the backgrounds are placeholder art that I will be replacing.

The player can speak!

Eva makes an appearance:

Welcome to your new life:

I swear, she's a sweet person:

Some choices unlock other choices:

Hopefully that stuff looks cool. Let me know! Now for the devlog:

• Install quest library
• Install dialog library - I'm sure this sounds simple, but it took me half a day to figure out how to integrate it into Unity in a way that would be performant.
• Create placeholder backgrounds - All these backgrounds are placeholder but I think they look pretty cool for being placeholder. These backgrounds are a little too serious for me. The real ones will have visual gags in them, too.
• Add the first background
• Fix letterboxing - Ugh, the bane of my existence. If you played the game in different resolutions, the text would be clipped. I fixed that.
• Start dialog in your futuristic home
• Create the intro scene (without portraits)
• The futuristic home scene dialogue should play during the intro scene - These features were for the scene with the first background.
• Setup a save/load system - You can't save/load in the game yet, but I needed to set this up with the libraries mentioned at the top of the feature list. The save/load system allows me to have fade out/in transitions between scenes.
• Split each conversation into its own scene
• Add bedroom scene background
• Add bedroom scene dialogue
• Change the default subtitle text
• Change the default character name text
• Adjust text spacing on intro
• Text scales with screen size - Just stuff so that the dialogue UI looks right.
• Show Eva in the scene - Before this, there were words, but no character visuals.
• Animate Eva showing up in the first scene and disappearing when the scene ends. - This was hard! The developer of the dialogue library literally built this functionality for ME! I'm using a tool called Spine that allows me to do 2D animation, but there wasn't any way to integrate it into the dialogue library until I showed up and asked for it :) Best technical support ever.
• Change narrator's node color so it's easy to tell when the narrator is speaking vs the npc - This is a technical change. Probably best to show with a picture: https://imgur.com/WG2WHxf See how the nodes have different color?
• Update dialogue/spine integration
• The narrator's voice should be in italics
• Change Eva's name from ??? to Eva in your first conversation with her. - This was hard to figure out how to do, too. The dialogue dev held my hand through this process.
• Only highlight the highlighted button when given a choice - This is a unity bug. I had to find a workaround for it. I guess by default, Unity doesn't realize you're changing focus from mouse hovers.
• Clicking should speed text to the end, not skip to the next line
• Change the dialogue background for menu selection - For some reason, the dialogue template makes the background in choices default to the same color as a highlighted button. I changed it so the background is now the same color as a non-highlighted button, which I think makes more sense.
• Animate Eva in the new bedroom dialogue
• Finish the dialogue in your new bedroom
• Change the sentence, "This is a surprise to everyone, including themselves." - When you start the game, there's some exposition to explain the world (I haven't shown gifs of this). I had my girlfriend play the game and she said one of these sentences sounded weird so I changed it.
• Player should not say his choice when you select a choice - This was a bug I discovered in the dialogue library. As you can see from that last gif, I have a hub of dialog choices. Even though I was saying to NOT do this, every time you clicked on one of those buttons, it was then having the player say the button you clicked on. The dev found the cause of the bug and fixed it for me this morning, so you can't see that problem in the gif.
• Make the display taller so you can fit more than 3 choices at once - There was only 3 choices visible on the screen at once and I don't think this was enough, so I made the dialogue UI taller.
• Increase font sizes - The previous feature made it so there was a lot of left over space at the bottom of the dialogue, so I increased font sizes to fill it up more.

Anyway, hope you're liking these changes. Let me know what you think!