🍨🎮 Yumykon Games Devlog #001 (Patreon)

Hey everyone!! How are you all doing??
Hope you all had a wonderful week! ✨

This is the first weekly devlog, and I want to share with you some of the progress I've made this week. I'm very excited and happy to have finally started, and I've been dedicating myself a lot to the development of this game.

First, I need to explain what the game is about. I'm not sure if I made it clear at some point, but anyway!

The game is about a story that will take place in the world of my original characters, Kana, Kari, Netsu, and Satomi. I usually call it the Yumyverse, but you won't hear Yumyverse that often in relation to the game. Since, from the characters' perspective and so on, they are in their own world and not in Yumy's world. Hahaha

Well, in this game, Kari will be the main character and the one we will control throughout the game. The story will involve a situation that will happen, and we will follow the unfolding of this story from Kari's perspective.

This visual novel, although it has interaction decisions, is not a visual novel with multiple endings; its story will be linear, and the interaction decisions will affect only the others characters' reactions. The game's feature will be to follow the unfolding of the story and have fun with various mini-games that the game will have. It's like watching an interactive anime in pixel art. LOL

Well, with the game explained, let's go to the first things I did this week?

Mockups

One of the fundamental points to have a perspective on what the visual part of the game will be like is by building a mockup. The mockup is the production of an art piece that exemplifies the main elements of the game to be used for artistic direction, game design, and even game planning based on this art.

The first mockup was to define things like color palettes, screen resolution, character sprite size, text box size, and so on. I made a sketch of Kari, a background sketch with blur, and the size of the text box:

The next mockups I made were to define the dynamics of interactions in relation to the presentation of sprites, text boxes, and so on.

For example, when Kari is thinking to herself, no sprite will appear.

When she is thinking to herself or making a statement where she is the center of attention, she will appear centered.

Now, the interactions between characters also have a certain dynamic.

When a character is speaking directly to us, the player (Kari), the character will be centered.

When two characters are conversing with each other, one will be on the left and the other on the right.

For now, with these mockups, I already have a good perspective to continue the development. I know it can still be much more dynamic and there are various combination possibilities, but I will refine that later in the development.

The next step, I decided to improve the text box and the font a bit, so I paid more attention to making it look better.

So far, I'm quite liked the final result of this text box and I intend for this version to most likely be the final one.

I also made a final mockup that exemplifies how the response choices in the game will look like:

With this, I started to put my hands a bit on the game's programming part 👀

Building Systems

I intend for this game to be released in multiple languages. For that, from the beginning of the development, I need to think about how to architect a dialogue system that facilitates the implementation of new languages.

In my research, I found out that translators usually take all the game’s text lines in a .csv file, translate everything, and send it back to the developer. I want to maintain this industry standard, but working with a .csv file within the game doesn't make much sense. So my idea was the following:

I programmed a Python script that takes the .CSV file and converts it into a .JSON table, which is more easily worked within the game since I can simply import the JSON file into the game and easily access each of the dialogues there.

It's my first time programming a dialogue system from scratch, but so far, I imagined the system could work this way:

I thought of spliting the dialogues because the game will often pause the dialogue system for various events like cutscenes, mini-games, etc.

Each dialogue can have 5, 10, 20 lines of text, containig how this text is presented, how the portrait is presented, its positioning, etc., it will be configured in the JSON file itself. So as soon as the text request is applied for changing the speech, the changes to the other elements will also be applied simultaneously.

The text request works like this:

Well, with this, I started to apply some of the concepts I planned, and so far, this was the small result I had at the end of the night:

That’s it for this week! I hope you enjoyed my first devlog. I would love to hear your feedback on anything you’d like to share with me.

Thank you for reading! See you next week ~

With love, Yumykon. 💕