![\"trello](\"http:\/\/www.caleb-perkins.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/leia-1024x648.png\")
<\/p>\nLeia was a pretty off-beat sprint for me, and I didn’t think it would turn out nearly as well as it did.\u00a0 During the first half, I got so bogged-down with incorporating YarnSpinner and running into limitations with Unity’s serialization that it felt like it wasn’t making any progress at all.<\/p>\n
As you’ll see below this was a really fantastic step forward once I got past a lot of those roadblocks, and it’s really starting to shape up into something substantive.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Things to stop doing:<\/strong><\/p>\n Things to keep doing:<\/strong><\/p>\n Things to start doing:<\/strong><\/p>\n For roughly the first quarter of the sprint, I got stuck trying to integrate YarnSpinner.\u00a0 I really love their team and I think their narrative engine is great, but it’s also incredibly new and their documentation is wildly out of date.\u00a0 That said, they were extremely helpful when I jumped into the community Slack with questions and their developers helped me get past all the issues I had setting it up.<\/p>\n I also wasted a lot of time running into Unity limitations.\u00a0 By default, Unity does not serialize dictionaries to the editor, which is difficult because it’s one of the most useful data structures for managing the narrative variables.\u00a0 I ended up implementing my own version with two lists and an editor script, but it still didn’t end up looking very good.<\/p>\n By the time I got into working on a generic sprite component I decided to check out the asset store to see if there was anything available.\u00a0 I had been recommended Odin<\/a> but I think it’s a little overkill for the moment (aside from also costing $55).\u00a0 Within a couple minutes I found my way to Serialized Dictionary Lite<\/a> which is exactly what I need at the moment and also completely free.\u00a0 Shoutout to Rotary Heart!<\/p>\n There’s a lot to unpack from this one gif.\u00a0 On the one hand, I’m really proud of how it looks with placeholder art.\u00a0 On the other hand, it also looks very similar to gifs I’ve posted in the past.\u00a0 So what’s changed?<\/p>\n Meet YarnSpinner — the narrative engine behind such titles as Night in the Woods<\/em>.\u00a0 Under the hood, it’s a pretty solid script parser with a lot of built-in features for narrative games.\u00a0 You write .Yarn files which each contain one or more nodes<\/em>, which the engine manages like a finite state machine.\u00a0 It has an API for saving variables (in the form of a bool, string, or int) and event hooks for things like the beginning of a line of dialogue or the end.\u00a0 You can also call Yarn Commands<\/em> directly from a script and create your own.\u00a0 This is how I’m changing the facial expression on my sprites above.<\/p>\n A lot of YarnSpinner comes down to how you decide to implement certain features.\u00a0 I created a YarnStorage scriptable object to hold my Yarn variables persistently and will be using it to track state and save it between sessions.\u00a0 I also have hooks so that as YarnSpinner’s DialogueRunner<\/em> passes new lines of parsed dialogue, my TextController<\/em> slices the name of the speaker off from the line and places it in the little speaker UI and passes the rest of the line to the actual dialogue box.<\/p>\n With YarnSpinner set up, getting sprites to change has been a fairly simple process.\u00a0 Behind the scenes it’s using the same scriptable object architecture I mentioned in my last sprint review.\u00a0 The character sprite set is a little different from the more generic sprite set object because characters are keeping track of body and face, but both follow the same logic.<\/p>\n In either case, YarnSpinner sends out a command that’s picked up by either the Background object or a specific, named character.\u00a0 Both execute a command which basically sets the Image reference to the value at the key in a dictionary based on the command parameter.<\/p>\n While I’ve been getting all this set up, my artist has made the second pass at character concepts with a focus on nailing color schemes this time:<\/p>\n I’m pretty pleased with how far I’ve come this sprint, and I’m looking forward to finishing up enough to really get a vertical slice through the intro scene.\u00a0 We’re rapidly approaching the point where enough foundation will be laid that I’ll mostly be doing a lot of scriptwriting, and I can’t wait.<\/p>\n ~Caleb<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Retrospective Leia was a pretty off-beat sprint for me, and I didn’t think it would turn out nearly as well as it did.\u00a0 During the first half, I got so bogged-down with incorporating YarnSpinner and running into limitations with Unity’s serialization that it felt like it wasn’t making any progress at all. As you’ll see […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":411,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[41,42,20],"class_list":["post-409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-development","tag-devdiary","tag-sprint-review","tag-the-card"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/serket.dev\/wp-content\/uploads\/secondpass_1.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paXf4J-6B","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/serket.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/serket.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/serket.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/serket.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/serket.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=409"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/serket.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":421,"href":"https:\/\/serket.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409\/revisions\/421"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/serket.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/411"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/serket.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/serket.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/serket.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
\n
\n
Progress<\/h3>\n
![\"intro](\"http:\/\/www.caleb-perkins.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/intro_test.gif\")
<\/p>\nYarnSpinner<\/h3>\n
![\"intro](\"http:\/\/www.caleb-perkins.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/holly_script.png\")
<\/p>\nSprite Changes<\/h3>\n
![\"character](\"http:\/\/www.caleb-perkins.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/character_manager.png\")
<\/p>\nArtwork<\/h3>\n
![\"concept_art_1\"](\"http:\/\/www.caleb-perkins.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/secondpass_1-1024x579.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"concept_art_2\"](\"http:\/\/www.caleb-perkins.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/secondpass_2-1024x577.png\")
<\/p>\nLast Thoughts<\/h2>\n