Halberd - Actors, Part 2

At the end of last month, Halberd's current iteration had its first birthday. I think that makes this my longest and most successful attempt so far! As I mentioned in my original post about Halberd, this has been a recurring project, something that I wanted to do for years but never managed to complete. Seeing a milestone like this is pretty nice!

That's enough celebrating though, it's time for dialogue.

Dialogue

As you might guess by when this is coming out, I missed my mark by about a week. Between taxes, a birthday, and a pixel art collab, I put a few too many tasks on my plate and the date slipped. I finished the feature, but then some health problems kept me from actually posting for a while.

It's been done for a while though! Dialogue trees can be displayed via trigger, and can have test boxes, choices, and even call triggers mid-dialogue. This obviously helps a lot on the storytelling end of things, making a coherent plot that lacks dialogue isn't easy.

The Editor

Right now, the dialogue editor is pretty bare-bones. It's just a property grid wrapped around a dialogue tree, with no special checks or previewing. As always though, the important thing is that it just works. Like all of Halberd's editors, I'll be making multiple polish passes over time to improve usability.

She's a fixer-upper

I think this is a good moment to also remind everyone reading this: This is the gain I was expecting to get from the propertygrid. Being able to will functioning simple asset editors into existence with next to no effort is what made the months of work worth doing. From now on, these basic 'propertygrid editors' are probably going to show up a lot when adding new features due to how fast they are to produce.

Frame Job

Another thing that you probably noticed in that video is the UI. There are still a couple of bugs to work out, but the system's in place and it's now possible to make a much nicer-looking interface.

The main goal that I was working towards with the UI was full layout customization, but right now it's restricted to just skinning the frames around various elements. It's a pretty standard '9-slice' setup, without any fancy bells and whistles, but it works.

Next Up Is...

Something different. I'm going to be changing gears a little, so that will wait for its own post.