#1 - Let's talk! (a dialogue system)

Hey there!

Since AZBH is mainly an RPG, character interactions take a huge part in unveiling the story of the game. Since the most basic form of communication between the characters is talking - a dialogue system seems to be a must.

I will go a little bit in-depth into the dialogue system I have prototyped for AZBH. Before I started coding the system and getting the UI art ready, I thought about a few things that I want to focus on:

1. I want the player to fully focus on the dialogue.
2. I want to 'personalize' how the messages look depending on the characters (kinda undertale-ish).
3. I want the player to be able to choose what to say to the NPCs.
4. Since the player controls 4 characters, he needs to know what character is talking.

ad.1 - I made the 'battle-adventure' GUI fade out when you enter a dialogue and added black bars at the top and bottom of the screen to get player's attention

ad.2 - Different characters can have different fonts and font colors.

ad.3 - Dialogue options box below the message box. Works like a charm, 10 minutes of work.

ad.4 - The currently talking character's portrait and name is displayed on the message box (possible face animations later?)

Here's how it looks so far (forgot to disable mouse-on-events, so there's a sword description for like half a second under the dialogue box lol):

So here's the boring part aka how does it work:

1. The player clicks on the NPC.
2. The mouse click triggers an event that creates a textbox object with a lot of arrays. 
3. The textbox object puts the game into a "cutscene" state which hides the battle GUI and triggers the black bars.
4. The textbox object reads the "current page" of the text with all of the arrays provided with an index of the current page.
5. After clicking, the textbox object goes into the next page (or the page of choice - if the current page has options)
6. If the player chooses the "end conversation" option, the textbox object deletes itself and puts the game out of the "cutscene" state.

Confusing? I guess. I know my code is not too optimized, but I can read it and it works.

Any thoughts? Leave me a comment!

Thank you for reading!
onyon