V.02 Dialogue About Dialogue
Yoohooooo,
I’ve been making a lot of progress on my new Flaminimi gallery.
Honestly, I feel silly for not starting to learn the GODOT game engine sooner. Programming isn’t easy, but it’s not that hard either! I studied computer science in high school and a bit in college, and those skills plus some more recent training courses have translated well into learning scripting for games.
This month I added a big update, dialogue boxes. I originally set out to build these from scratch. I always will try to write my own code first, because I want to understand how what I’m making works. That being said… I got frustrated trying to build functioning text boxes from scratch. The tutorials I found online were either outdated, not what I was looking for, or too complicated for where I’m at right now. I ultimately decided I don’t need to reprogram the wheel. I downloaded a free add-on for GODOT called Dialogic, which adds functionality for text boxes while still being highly customizable.
Now you can click on dolls and some objects to interact with them. Here’s a little sample of what that looks like in action:
The example I showed in the video was Enigma’s design and caption. It was so funny first seeing this doll, and the pacing and text effects I added with these dialogue boxes elevates it even more.
The blank dolls in the lobby are just place holders and have nothing to say. The dolls in the lobby that do have outfits were all designed by friends over a year ago in real life (Credits for each doll will be in the next update). I used photos as textures to digitally recreate their work, and captions provided by some of them to use as dialogue.
I added some of my own code to control the camera while dialogue plays. You also might have noticed I added a little circle that expands when you’re mousing over a clickable object. It was difficult to tell what was clickable without that.
In order to optimize (something I am still quite bad at) I put a bunch of outfits the lobby dolls are wearing onto one image that I used as a shared texture for all of them:
This is far from all the Flaminimis people made. These aren’t even all the ones from the original batch.
The dolls weren’t the only ones to get dialogue. So far the gallery only has two rooms. One of those rooms was filled with doodles on its wall. How many? Well I wasn’t actually sure until I made dialogue for all 103 of them! This felt like a good low stakes challenge to get myself writing more, since none of the drawings have more than a few lines of text attached. Many are silly, some are strange or sentimental. I’m not going to go through them all here, so if you want to read it you’ll have to check out the gallery yourself.
Everyone that visits will gravitate to different areas, and experience this space in a unique order. That’s a quality video games have that traditional media generally can not replicate.
What’s next?
As soon as I got this update up I started working on the next one. Developing this gallery has been extremely creatively fulfilling and I’m learning a lot quickly. Next month’s update, V.03 will be even bigger.
I have a lot of dolls to digitize and add to the lobby still. Some are unfortunately missing credits or captions, but I think that adds a bit of mystique.
I may update the appearance of the lobby too. The way it looks now is a placeholder, it’s basically just a big box with a noise texture for the walls. Architectural designs have always been a weaker area for my art, so I’d like to get more practice making spaces.
Right now the portals look… kind of bad if I’m being honest. They don’t immediately read as doors you can walk into, even with door frames. I looked into making better looking ones, but the code was too complicated for where I’m at right now. Luckily GODOT 4.5 came out recently and introduced a new feature that makes creating portals a lot simpler, stencil buffers. I’ve been updating the existing portals to use these and it is such an amazing before and after. It made a few bugs that I’ve been squashing, but I feel confident it will be ready for October.
Currently there’s two varieties of Flaminimis in the gallery, the original design and the one I made this summer. This next update will bring new dolls based on other local drag performers! I’ve already finished four new ones, but you’ll have to wait to see them. Of course these new paper dolls are going to need new outfits… and that’s where the biggest part of this next update comes in…
I’m making an in game outfit designer! It was an obvious addition for a project about dolls. So far it’s pretty rudimentary. It lets the player add in basic shapes that can be colored, positioned, rotated, and scaled. Despite being simple, it’s already quite expressive. Here are some dolls I’ve designed using this digital editor:
Ultimately this gallery is a space to learn and experiment. I have lots more ideas, but I think I’ll just share what I have immediate plans to work on. Thanks for taking the time to read this. I’ll post another devlog next month. Until then…
