Problem Solving: Who's Talking?? (Patreon)

While developing the Benefitship demo, the only thing distinguishing who was talking was the name above their dialogue. I sometimes found that I had trouble telling who was talking, but it was pretty rare, so I decided to release the demo as it was.

However, we quickly received feedback from players, noting that several people had trouble with it, too. As a matter of fact, it was the most common criticism we had.

But how do we solve that problem?

Well, some visual novels simply make the speaking character larger. Others decrease the saturation or brightness of the non-speaking character. Others still change the color of the text box.

We couldn't do any of these. We can't darken the sprites because they're already tinted to match the environmental lighting, and tinting them further looks out of place. The same issue occurs with changing their size, as they move around so much that a size change feels downright unnatural.

Plus, sometimes characters talk without their sprites being visible, so it wouldn't have worked for those situations anyway.

As for changing the text box... well... we don't have a text box.

I tried several different ideas, but eventually found that changing the colour of the text shadow resolved the issue for us. This concept, along with the design of the text itself, was loosely inspired by anime subs; Particularly those seen on Crunchyroll.

Of course, then I had to spend even more time figuring which colours to make them. In the end, I think we resolved the problem in the clearest, most efficient and unintrusive way we could.