We've been working on a new way to present stories to the player, and we've decided to go with a comic format. The visual style of our generated characters is very "illustrated" and I think they look right at home in comic panels.
The major challenge has been to build a tool that allows us to create this comic presentation quickly, while being sensitive to localization, generated content, and dynamic writing. Challenge number one is what to do if the text is too long to fit. The solution is that each panel has a Text Overflow Strategy, that defines what to do if the text doesn't fit. The default strategy is to insert another, identical panel, with the remaining text. So here's what an event looks like if it has no special processing:
It's not the prettiest thing, but it's not broken, either, and that's key. The next major challenge is how to specify panels in a way that's flexible, concise, and accessible to writers and artists. I decided that since it's intimately bound up with the text of an event, the panel specification needs to live with the localization lines themselves. I settled in on a little homebrew panel tag format. It's a bit custom but the nice thing is that it's very concise, easy to read and easy to learn. Here's what that looks like in the editor.
But, the panel format is not terribly discoverable, so we also let you click on a panel in order to change everything about it. This will then write the panel spec back out to the localization line. You can change everything about a panel using this editor.
So, we're approaching a place where we can quickly convert an event from a prose format to a comic format. It's taken a lot of work to get here, but it's already having a big impact on how we write events, and I think this comic format will end up on the of most recognizable aspects of our game.
I like it. It's pretty.
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