So, the game will have the character-dialogues to further your relationship with each of the main characters, but there’s another important thing that you do between races: Press-conferences.
Now, this isn’t that different from your interactions with the characters, but in presentation we wanted to make it more distinct, instead of just having a dialogue-box with different portraits above it like all the other times. This would also make it easier to communicate that the player is talking to a mass of people and not just a single person.
At first we thought about just having a static camera in front of the player character and then having people ask questions from off-screen, like in our early concept:
This would work for sure, but it also felt like it would get a bit boring pretty fast, so we came up with another structure for the scene.
The image is about 1080x3960p, able to fit two screens horizontally. On one side the character will sit and on the other there are a group of journalists.
The thought behind the journalist being grey and melding into one another through their black shapes was to give them each less of an identity and more of a collective form, kind of working like a very big character-portrait for the whole group.
To make this transition back and forth between the player and journalists more dynamic we’re gonna implement a camera-sweep from side to side whenever one or the other talks.
A big inspiration for this choice of presentation was the Phoenix Wright-games, which uses this swishing camera-transition alot when going from character to character in the courtroom-cases dialogues. I made a mockup of this in photoshop, though in Unity it’ll be as simple as panning the camera back and forth.
As I felt it would get a bit static and boring as it is right now, I also animated a kind of talking-icon which we’ll be able to use above the crowd to better communicate that they’re talking.
So that’s it so far concerning our press-conference-scene. The camera-sweep has at this point in time been implemented, and the spritesheet for the talking animation is also ready to bring into the engine. Further polish may occur if we have the time to do so, probably animations for the main character in that case.
That has been it for this time, thank you for reading and have a good day!
Daniel Qvarnemark.
Karmosin 