Viola's World: Introduction

This week I worked on adding story content to Viola. I've added three methods of storytelling in the game, all of which deserve their own post!

In this post you can get a look at the introductory cutscene. The level I'm creating is the "vertical slice": a piece of finished game to showcase. The level itself is a little later into the game, so the player needs context before playing the game.

Click 'Read more' to read more about creating this cutscene.

Timeline

Unity has a fantastic feature called Timeline, which allows you to call animations and activations in certain order over time. It's almost like a video editor! 

RPGTalk has a feature that works with Timeline. Rather than playing lines and waiting for player input, the text can scroll by automatically, stay on screen with a certain timing and play at different speeds.

Timeline naturally works with Unity's animation system. You can simply call animation clips in Timeline, rather than working the Animator component on your objects.

Story

The story has simplified: rather than a world created by Viola's mind, she's simply drawn into a magical violin. That takes away some of the potential world-building and makes the story less complex. This is also a good thing: the focus then naturally shifts to the main character and their conflict.

I still want to introduce more direct, actionable conflict to the story. Personal growth is a great story goal, but sort of disconnected from the player.