"Focus, People!"
Today’s post for NaCreSoMo isn’t exactly creative, but it probably counts as “creative process”: working on the technical aspects of visual novels. Specifically? Dialogue.
The standard visual novel format shows dialogue with character “sprites” over a background. In the (admittedly few) that I’ve read so far, I’ve seen three ways to show who’s talking:
- Make sure to change that character’s expression just before their lines (as seen in Umineko)
- Move the speaking character’s sprite up and inward a little (as seen in Juniper’s Knot)
- Only ever show the speaking character’s sprite (as seen in Butterfly Soup)
I get the feeling that the second is the most common these days, and that the first was probably something that was more important back in the days of tiny screens. But that’s not something built into Ren’Py, the free visual novel engine I used for last year’s mockup of a Morning Glory VN. So today I tried to find out how hard it would be to add, and…
Credit to monole from the Lemma Soft forums for implementing the interpolation functions to make the movement a little less jarring, although it’s so fast you’d probably hardly notice.
Here’s a version with just fades between expressions for comparison.
Which one do you like better?
Part of NaCreSoMo 2018.