Evolution of the Comic Format

It took us a while to settle on the comic-style events that you've been seeing posts about lately. And what fun is a development blog if you can't see all the little twists and turns the devs took to get somewhere?

Okay, so, we started out with events being paragraphs of text, followed by stacked buttons naming your choices. This seemed pretty straightforward:

Except you may notice that the dialog box will only look like that if the event is two sentences long. And we found that we couldn't exactly tell the types of stories we wanted in two sentences, because this isn't Twitter.

Unless we wanted walls of text, we were going to have to break things up, pagination style. We thought we were being very fancy by adding a portrait beside the text here:

The paragraphs look a little more manageable, but how do we want to do dialog? We want our heroes to be chatty, and we want you to get a feel for their personalities through how they talk to each other. I started throwing layouts at the wall to see if anything stuck, but I seemed to be getting bogged down in this format:

Aside from not being very flexible, it looked like the heroes were texting each other. Sigh.

Then Crazy-Man Nate comes out with this mockup:

Whoa, just comics? Like... straight up comic panels? Can you DO that in a game like ours? I guess the game already doesn't take itself too seriously, but... this is a pretty big leap. And wouldn't it take a crap-ton of design work? Also the idea of trying to localize it to German made my stomach hurt.

"Don't worry about that. I can take care of that with programming," Nate said.

So then we planned it all out. Nate would build the Comic Lab, complete with... all this stuff. We'd have some abstract-ish backgrounds to choose from, and a bunch of knobs and dials that Doug could use to place the heroes and make them be interesting. And indeed, even if the German translation is ridiculous, the whole thing is built such that text overflowing into an extra panel isn't too awkward.

We kept not only the pagination, but decided to have each click of the mouse bring in the next panel. This creates a really nice pacing effect and keeps the reader from getting too overwhelmed by text and being tempted to skip or skim most of the event.

So then I did a pass to match the comics to our current UI style, and we were here:

Which is, you know. Fine and all. BUT. Big "but"—the interesting thing about these comics is that they'll always fit into a certain size "window." Which means that the dialog holding the comics doesn't need to be scalable. Which means we can get fancy.

Fancier!

Yeah that's more like it.

And that's where we are now. Maybe we'll have more improvements to make, and there are a few unanswered questions about the best way to potentially fit other types of information (quest rewards, leveling up) into this format as well. But it feels really good at the moment. Doug is working his magic and creating events that really bring the heroes to life.