Light The Midnight - Narrative
Writing
The document above is some of the details that I had come up with in order to explain how the world got to the state that it was in. Some of the other details that are included here were bits of flavor text that we used in order to set the tone of the world. This is also what had lead me to the character who sets the tone of the game, and one I had voiced: Dr. Dunkelheit. An eccentric, yet silly scientist who wants to help the player along with their survival. He tells the player how the game works and what they need to do in the first few minutes of the game. I used the goofy nature of his personality to convey the controls, as well as some of the rules for how the world works.
This image is an example of what the mechanisms involved with the dialogue are. Using Unity's timeline system, which I had learned how to use from my time at Night City and working on Brain Agents, I made the dialogue convey in a sequence. Inside of the script that this timeline object is attached to are elements that change what the active timeline object inside of the director is. These changes also reflect the changing states of the game, such as when the player loses health, gains a number of points, and opens the first door.
One of the most important points that I wanted to cover in this tutorial was ensuring that none of the dialogue was skipped or talked over itself. It took a little while to get it right. The solution that I came to was having a script that housed the tutorial variables and signal the script when the lines were finished. Dialogue was lined up manually to ensure that it played at the appropriate time.
This was the script which housed each of the tutorial prefabs and how they would be queued. Since the tutorial dialogue was context sensitive, I wanted to ensure that all the dialogue didn't play at once. This involved pairing the timeline system, with a large case switch state machine. Inside of the states, the dialogue boxes would be enabled, and their audio associated with them would play.