Visual novel system

As many of you might already know, a Visual Novel is a popular genre of game that consists in a series of dialogues accompanied by images of the participating characters. It's a very accessible type of game either to develop and play. I implemented a custom Visual Novel style narrative into the Orchid Rain map editor project that you can easily make use of to give some story to your levels.

We'll start by creating a Level Visual Novels object anywhere in the Project panel. Right click and select Create > Game Stats > Level Visual Novels.

This is what you'll see in the Inspector once you create it. A Dialogue is a collection of many "Sequences", or Lines. Reveal the Dialogues field by giving it a value of 1.

We now see more fields.

• Dialogue Name
  • This is the name you assign to this Dialogue
  • The only purpose of this is just to help you organize your Dialogues
• Sequence
  • This is where all the Lines of Dialogue will be defined.
• Dialogue Music
  • If you want some custom music to play for each Dialogue, you can put an audio file in here
  • If this remains empty, the the normal level music will continue playing

Expand Sequence by giving it a value of 1.

The contents of a Sequence are now available to edit. Normally, a Dialogue will contain many Sequences. You can think of a Sequence as a Dialogue "line", as in a line on a movie script. A Sequence is the equivalent of one screen of text, said by a character.

• Image
  • The image that will be shown in game for this Sequence
  • This is normally the image of the character that is supposed to be the one talking
• Text
  • The text that will be shown in the screen
  • This is what the character is currently saying
• Animation
  • When set to other than None, the image will appear on screen with an animation
  • From Left
    • The image will appear sliding from the left
  • From Right
    • The image will appear sliding from the right
  • Fade In
    • The image will appear with a slow fade in, while being stationary
  • Shake
    • The image will shake for a short duration of time
• Screen Position
  • This determines where in the screen the image will appear
    • A value of 1 makes the image appear all the way to the right of the screen
    • A value of -1, makes it appear all the way to the left
    • A value in between makes the image appear at a middle point
• Line Voice Clip
  • A sound can be played for each Sequence, or every time a character speaks
  • This is intended for voice acting, but you're free to use this in any way you'd like

Let's say we want a Dialogue where one character asks a question to the player, to which the player says something and the asking character gets angry. These are 3 lines of Dialogue, so we'll need 3 Sequences.

Each Sequence contains a line of dialogue that a character is supposed to be saying. I'll show you how the following Dialogue will be seen in-game.

Right, so now we have a Dialogue completely lined out. We now need to create a new GameObject and give it a Visual Novel Receiver component.

Add an appropriate Trigger to activate this Receiver. I added a Level Start Trigger so that the Dialogue shows as soon as the level loads. In the Visual Novels field, drop the Level Visual Novels object we just edited. The property Visual Novel Index will determine which Dialogue will play. So far we've only done one Dialogue, but we can write many more if we wished to.