The Cinematic Elements of Ninjio: The Gear Dialogue System

Disclaimer:

Most of the projects that I will be doing are for a game that I am developing on my own code named Project Ninjio. In short, the game is a story action driven role playing game (common referred to as an action RPG). It features 2 uniquely styled areas, one in which the cities are built to flow along with nature, and the other where the cites are hyper futuristic. The game is set in a futuristic China, where after a large war, the country is split into the two settings described above. The game is built in the Unity 3D game engine.

The Cinematic Elements of Ninjio: The Gear Dialogue System

The dialogues as seen in game!

Introduction

Ninjio's story is mostly told through cinematic elements like in-game cut scenes and dialogue events. These elements are custom made by myself to ensure a very enjoyable experience. If you take a look at the story for the demo that I released 2 weeks back, you can easily see that within the 9 pages worth of story, almost all of the story that is told during the demo is told via dialogue between the characters with only a few portions being open for the player to interact with themselves. In order to deal with the massive amounts of dialogue that Ninjio as a whole has, I have written a custom script that allows for me to easily edit and add dialogue inside the Unity game engine that I have dubbed the Gear Dialogue System. My system, in combination with the fairly new addition of the Unity Timeline editor, has allowed me to write and direct the cut scenes, dialogue, and anything else that moves with relative ease. 

Gear Dialogue System (GDS)

What I work with to create
a piece of dialogue

The Gear Dialogue System allows me to quickly create and develop cutscenes for Ninjio. The system itself took around a month of time to properly develop and perfect. The GDS allows for me to type in dialogue (usaly copied directly from the demo's story document) for a character to say, have any actions such as loading a level or playing a sound effect after a the line of dialogue is said, specificy how long (if at all) the line of dialogue should be held for after being displayed, specify if the characters should be able to freely move around during the dialogue, and (most importantly) who is saying the lines of dialogue.
Each character, during a dialogue interaction, has not only their Pinyin name (like Huai Ren), but also their English name and Chinese name (Bad Guy and 坏人 respectively). The Chinese and Pinyin names are shown by default to the player, but just because a few people may be curious, I added the ability to hover over the Pinyin name of the character in English. The whole character name thing is all something that I wanted people to use in order to learn the names of the characters, even though they are in a different language.
The GDS, in tandem with the preexisting Unity Timeline editor, more information here, allows for the rapid development of Ninijo's story.

This week's work log:

Monday February 26th:Worked on the first cutscene

Tuesday February 27th: Worked on particle effect that are to happen during the first cutscene

Wednesday February 28th: Computer died, but still was able to sketch a police bot on ye olde pencil and paper.

Thursday March 1st: Did some more work on the UI.

Friday March 2nd: Finalized the last, I hope, UI element.

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