A few times now since releasing The Cardinal Crusade demo here on Game Jolt, we’ve had the request for a way to skip a cutscene.

Currently you have to spam your way through all the speech in the game if you’re not interested and as much as it breaks our delicate hearts to hear some people just aren’t interested in story, we’ve decided it’s a good idea to accommodate as many play styles as possible.

So without further ado, let’s make a gosh darn skip button for cutscenes!

The difficulties behind this feature

You might be wondering why we don’t already have this feature? The answer is simple, we over looked it and now it’s way harder to do.

We actually had the ability to skip cutscenes in the first version of The Cardinal Crusade before the notorious graphical restart.

See that? A skip button right there on the pause menu. Truly revolutionary stuff right?

When we did the restart we completely neglected that feature and our cutscenes became much more complicated which made skipping them much more complicated as well.

Back then all we had to do was go to the next room (room = Game Maker terminology for level essentially). Now our cutscenes span more than one room and unlock various abilities throughout. So skipping them is much harder than it used to be.

We need to be able to tell the game where to go and what to do before going there in order to unlock any abilities that need unlocking.

The intended solution

I’ll try not to get too technical here.

Basically the intended solution is to create a piece of code that we can map to certain cutscenes. When you press the skip button, the game will look at the current cutscene and run the code that we mapped to said cutscene. That code will then tell the game what to do and where to go.

Sounds simple right?

The result

Yeah, the basics are totally that simple!

Above you can see a GIF of one of a tutorial cutscene getting skipped.

The tutorial cutscenes are very simple and therefor easy to skip. Other cutscene like pre and post boss cutscenes will be slightly more complicated to skip due to them having more complicated functionality but this system should be able to handle all cases providing we are careful with our code.

That’s it for this devlog.
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Thanks for reading!