So, I announced Blanche Biche will be a Unity game due to its support for Live2D, but you might still be wondering what Live2D is all about. Simply put, it's a 2D animation software. But its specificity is that it's not a frame-by-frame animation tool. What it does is, it allows you to create a model which deforms itself according to a variety of parameters. Thus, you can effectively open and close the eyes, tilt the head, stretch the mouth, and so on, pretty much like you would with a 3D model--except there's zero 3D in there. So it's just animated 2D, but cleverly so. Models created by professionals may look incredibly lively and give an impressive illusion of depth.
Pretty nice, huh? Well, that's just what we're trying to do with our own graphics. My partner Blueroze is currently spending all of her free time rigging her first model, and she's not quite there yet, but most of the face is ready to be animated already. Here's a quick video from the editor to show you how it looks like so far.
So, I don't know about you, but as far as I'm concerned I'm a huge fan. And if you were wondering, it's her first shot at it, so I can't wait to see how it turns out in the end. :)
So, we've been thinking for a while about a proper title for our dear Project Conversation. And we've found it. Moonpearl and Blueroze proudly present: Blanche Biche (French for White Doe).
We'll leave it up to you to speculate about the implications of that title for now, and what on earth this has to do with a dating sim. :) But I'll provide a few elements of context as hints. Let us know if you have any theories in the comments!
La complainte de la blanche biche(The White Doe's Complaint) is a medieval ballad from Western France. Here's a link to my personal favorite performance of it, along with a translation of the lyrics.
As I announced in my previous post, we were considering a switch to Unity, mainly because of the Live2D support. So I've been poking around, trying to assess whether the Unity framework and C# was for me. To be honest, I think if I'd tried it a few years ago, C# would've turned me off. But I figured, I have so much experience in programming, and I wish to go into business as a game developer, I can't just stop at the difficulty of a new language. Plus, I learned Python so easily that it encouraged me to take the plunge.
So I need to recode everything I've done for Project Conversation in Unity/C# and it's probably be tedious and boring (rather than actually challenging, since I merely need to translate scripts from a language to another). But first I had to recreate a visual novel-like gameplay, and that's when I realized Unity allows one to do something very cool--you can program the editor itself! If you remember my works for RPG Maker XP, you should know that I like to hijack the system to make the game designer's life easier, like I did with my Balloon System or the Party Interaction System. So the mere possibility of messing around with the editor was the ultimate argument to win my heart, I guess.
Thus, the first challenge I set myself was to create a node-based editor to make it possible for me (and more importantly, for my partner) to write dialogue scenes in a simple, visual fashion. I know such a system already exists in the Asset Store, but it's paid, and I don't like how it works, and I couldn't just build a game for someone else's scripts and call it mine anyway. So I gathered my courage and well, I made it. It's quite crude by the time I'm writing this, but the basic concepts are there. You can create dialogue boxes, connect them in the order you want them to appear. And more importantly, it all converts into game logic which make the scene unfold exactly like you've set it up when you run the program. To be honest, I was surprised it actually worked (almost) at first, with so few bugs. :p So I'm quite proud of my work. :)
So, unless I run into a huge problem, you can expect Project Conversation to go to Unity. :)
