Did you know that, if you hit the Enter key in the first part of this game fairly quickly, there is a chance you could skip the battle with the door?

The theme of this development blog is to talk a bit about the methods that were used to reach the final result and some concessions due to time.

Regarding the battles they are very simple scenes where no complicated structures are used, some fixes and many public variables are used.

Why Unity?

The reason for choosing this engine, first was because it is the one that runs best on my computer, I'm using the 2019 version, unfortunately Unreal is out of the game.

It is also worth noting that the engine is free to use.

Although the most important thing, perhaps, is that I found two ways to make novels with this engine and they were created by unknown people from the Internet, so I decided to give it a try to see how it turned out.

Besides implementing additional things that engines focused on visual novels can't give.

It was a fun experiment to expose my crazy ideas.

Making novels in Unity 

The first scene of the novel where the buttons are in the dialog box, uses the method created by Stellar Studio and is based on the use of collections to define the elements of each event taking advantage of the IEnumerator structure.

To get to implement this in my project I followed the tutorials of his channel, if you take a look at the tutorials you will realize that it is several hours of work, so days before the Jam I dedicated myself to analyze his way of making novels.

Once seen the result is satisfactory, taking into account that Unity is not the best engine for this kind of games. 

Some remarkable aspects for those who want to use this way of telling stories as a guide are: better control of the events, compared to the other method I used, since it is possible to make longer pauses when showing dialogues, between transitions, music or video. The use of buttons is also implemented, although in my case I decided not to implement them to make a joke about it.

Dialogues have a better presentation, as well as appearances and transitions. In addition, the story is written in an external text file, although it must follow the format that was created by its respective author, which is not very complicated to understand.

Perhaps the only disadvantage of using this system is the level of processing that can be more expensive, making the scenes slower.

From the second scene we use the system created by HIZUVI using the Node class in Unity.

It is certainly faster when loading each new element presented on screen, although Unity is not the fastest for loading videos.

There is no control to avoid overlapping nodes if one advances too fast, in this case one must be the one who defines at what time to stop or pause in this regard, but especially the dialogs are defined within the engine because that is where the nodes are defined, which is one of its disadvantages. 

In its favor it is an easier method to understand and improve.

After experimenting with both systems, I have to say that both have their advantages and disadvantages, and I recommend the use of either one. 

Taking into account that Unity is not made to make visual novels both assets have impressed me, I recognize the effort of Stellar Studio and HIZUVI.

Now, don't do as I did to implement both systems in the same project.

This time I only did it to experiment and make a demo with a game, but it is better to choose only one method and improve it with new elements.

I hope people will be encouraged to try to make some novels in Unity.

Moving on to another important point.

I wanted to promote Replica Studio, a tool that generates voices with artificial intelligence, something similar to what vocaloid or loquendo do, but with better tuning and clarity in the voices, becoming almost imperceptible compared to the speech of a person. 

In this case I decided to create a couple of spoken dialogues for the final scene as a demonstration.

Although perhaps the only detriment, which does not detract from the value of this tool, is that it is a paid license product, but at least the common user is granted 30 minutes of free spoken dialogue, enough for a Jam for example. 

This is the end of this development blog, I hope you are having a good day.