This was an exciting one: cutscenes! I initially had literally no idea how to do this, and it took a good while to figure it out and get a lot right. I had to learn Unity Timelines, and I grabbed the free asset Cinemachine to handle the cameras (which I do have a few issues with; you’ll see the jump at the end of the cutscene when it transfers to gameplay). That jump was mostly remedied later on, but it’s very difficult to fix, and so I will be looking for other ways, possibly just Game Creator cameras, to construct these cutscenes.

Timeline, however, is a cool little tool built into Unity, and I also learned some animation using this as well! The door, for example, was something I quickly modeled with ProBuilder and animated in timeline to open and close (and timed the sound effects). I also got to animate the lights which was fun, but it was a little challenging to get the sound effects to line up just right.

This was also the first time I was able to use the Dialogue system from Game Creator, which I will make a video of at some point as I had to set it up very specifically to get it to do what I wanted using the character avatars. It’s not very apparent here but it will be when I start showing two characters interacting (which I have practiced with but not made anything official for yet).

I upgraded the background sound effects with randomized extra sound effects that occur at certain random intervals, just to make things seem a little more natural.

You’ll also notice that Allison is finally the main character! It was around this point I decided to scrap the idea for a separate demo and started constructing this how I wanted the game to start canonically. Of course the story and dialogue needs so work but it’s early yet ;D

This video was recorded on December 22, 2020.