This week in BYTE was all about making the game more visually dynamic to look at. After talking with a coworker about it, he suggested that I get rid of the character portraits entirely, arguing that the visuals were distinct enough that even the new character portraits distracted from the visuals. I didn’t like the idea of getting rid of the portraits initially because I felt like the game would feel too bland just staring at a mostly static image with all the text boxes, but I’ve been thinking about adding cinematic camera angles into the game for a while and that would be a good replacement for the portraits.

I got to work creating a system that could place a dialogue camera in locations based on set shot descriptions that have the shot name and positional data telling the camera where to be in relation to the speaker of the line. It took a few tries to get it all in the right order and find the data that I wanted in, but I got it working and created about ten different shots that I can use freely.

It looks pretty, pretty good, I’ll say. Having the camera move around and being able to zoom in and out gives me much more control over the feel and communication of lines and makes the entire game feel a lot more dynamic. It doesn’t come through as well in images (I haven’t made GIFs yet), but trust me, the difference is very significant.

This week I’m just going to be trying to update all my pitch materials with new GIFs and videos that have my new rendering and cinematics to keep it all up to date with my latest visuals.