Hi everyone! I hope you’re doing great on this last sprint until Christmas Holidays <3

First of all, I owe you an apology: this devlog should have been out a few days ago, but there is an explanation you may understand.

As you know, I’m located in Spain, and I’ve been working hard this last week with a group of local devs to get the national chapter of Game Workers Unite up and running!

If you don’t know what GWU is, check out their Twitter. And check ours too!

There’s been a LOT of positive feedback and we’ve been attending national press media, preparing the group structure and processing membership applications, so I’ve been quite busy (and stressed).

Now that this launching has been done and the group has been established, I have some spare time to write the devlog and tell you about the base Dialogue System of I, Penguin!

But first, I want to make a very short introduction of…

The mood of the game

I, Penguin might be a silly game with penguins slapping each other ocasionaly, but the real mood of the game will be determined by how we craft the dialogues.

I’m still trying to grasp a definitive mood set and story for I, Penguin. I want it to talk about the importance of being comfortable with yourself, focusing on the actions and not the rewards, and loving and supporting your closest ones.

You may not be the hero, but that’s ok, as long as you try to be as good as you can.

Some of the characters you find along your little journey will have problems of their own. You’ll be able to help some of them out, but not all of them. Other characters will just offer some small talk or funny trivia, and others may even help you out with your own issues.

I want to get all of this written in a small pitch presentation these winter holidays, so I’ll delve into it when the time comes!

Now, let’s get to the point:

The Dialogue system

Let’s start from the beginning. The jam release of I, Penguin offered a few NPCs you could interact with, offering some dialogue to set the silly mood of the game:

I have mixed feelings about the jam version, honestly.

The dialogues were more like soliloquies, there was no expression whatsoever coming from the talking penguin and the overall system was a bit of a mess, making it difficult to add or update them.

So I started with a small change in my mind: the main character will have stuff to say too.

The first iteration of the system looked like this:

Please, don’t mind the hyperbolic bloom effect.

This test had already the camera position change (god bless Cinemachine), a very raw text UI and the two-participant dialogue sistem in place. The IK system previously implemented made the conversation more realistic, as the penguins are paying attention to each other.

Also, the dialogues are stored in ScriptableObject assets, which makes their use and creation way easier than before, but it’s not definitive yet, as I’ll need a new system which has to support localizated text variations.

The next iteration was to have a small eye expression system, to add a bit more of emotion to each spoken line. It simply changes the texture, adding or removing eyelids to the penguins, but it works pretty great!

This gif is full of h u m o r.

Once we got to this state, we decided to start working on mouth animations. Rha did an amazing job with the lip movement, but we faced a huge problem: they required bone scaling and repositioning.

The Unity built-in IK system only works for Humanoid rigs, and this specific rigging system only supports bone rotation in its animations. To get the best animations possible we need to use Generic rigs. We were having a clash of interests.

Doesn’t look so good without bone displacement…

The first thing I tried was to make a very barebones IK system on my own.

Very bad idea.

Then, Rha tried to adjust the rig of the model to avoid, at least, the eyeroll problem.

How did it get even worse?

Nothing seemed to work at the moment, so we opted for the easiest solution: buying an IK plugin to handle the situation with ease.

And it worked pretty nicely I must say. Final IK quickly solved our issue, allowing us to keep using the Generic rig system.

Once we got that out of the way, I programmed the movement to follow the spoken text, kind off. It simply picks each sentence’s length and loops the animation a proportional amount of time.

Now we’re talking.

And so we have it: the basic dialogue system is complete! It needs some more tweaks on the IK system, but we’re proud of the results.

That’s all for this Devlog. At the end of the year I’ll post a Patron Exclusive Devlog talking about the design of the combat mechanics. Will be a bit short, but I hope you’ll find it interesting!

Have a nice day everyone!