Yup, you get a blog post on a Thursday this week!
That's because it's Easter this weekend, so Friday and Monday are bank holidays. And that means day off!
So, what news is there in this mildly early blog post? Well, the branching dialogue JSON tutorial is FINALLY live! The tutorial is a little less in-depth as the previous ones, mainly because it's building upon them but also because it was a bit more difficult to decide which bits needed laying out step-by-step.
Spoiler alert, I came to the decision that most of it didn't need me writing out the events, so you get screenshots instead.
The tutorial covers branching dialogue and what I call 'event' dialogue, which is essentially, talk to a person, do a thing, talk to person again and they say something different. Both types of dialogue use a value in the JSON to point the dialogue system to the next thing the NPC is supposed to say. So it should be easy enough to make different dialogue paths that branch off in different directions etc.
I've also been messing about with ideas for menu designs because I figured it'd be a good idea to have a placeholder in the game at the very least. What this means for you is that I'm currently working on two keyboard controlled example projects that I'll be able to share soon, along with a few words about how they work. Because it's one thing having a set of buttons that a player can tap or click on, but being able to navigate a menu with a keyboard is a little more tricky. The projects both function in the same way but are laid out a little differently - one is a standard grid and one is a rotating menu. If you've come across StarFox Adventures, it's similar to Fox's communicator. Well, that's where the idea came from anyway.
So that's where I'm at, nothing too exciting to report, but I promise stuff is still happening! Hope you're all doing okay :)