This week’s progress has gone pretty par-the-course, scenes are getting written up, sprites are being produced, CGs and music are constantly being worked on.  All fairly standard stuff, and nothing we can actually show.  Rather, we’re going to backpedal a bit and show something we’ve been sitting on for a little while.

We have two characters with unique speech patterns.  Working with our writers, we’ve come up with a couple of text effects to accommodate them.  Oliver isn’t the world’s greatest public speaker, and we didn’t want to overly rely on s-s-stuttering.  Our solution was  to implement a gradient system that would allow us to manipulate a text’s opacity.

 It’s not limited to just fading-out text, though.  We can fade-in, fade-out, start the fade at a specific point in the writing, or even just set a flat opacity for the entire thing.

The second was built with Caprice in mind.  She has a habit of getting louder

and LOUDER

and LOUDER

as she talks.  This was addressed by taking the previous gradient system and applying it to font size instead.

In both opacity and font size, the minimum and maximum values can be set and customized for each occasion.  We’ve been making sure neither turn out to be an annoyance in the script thus far.  We’re happy with the results, but we don’t intend to overuse them.

Oh, also.