beginner questions about visual novel text output

[Jason in MN]

Hello!

I'm brand new to both Articy and Unity. I'm interested in making a visual novel, but I can't figure out the best way to design the appearance of the game text and user interface. None of the tutorials I've found seem to cover that. The default flow player debugger that exports to unity looks super awkward.

For example, how do I change text box size? The Maniac Manfred sample project uses goofy white arrows as UI. The flow player displays the title of the flow element and other technical information that doesn't belong in the game. I tried deleting that display in Unity, but it seemed to make the player stop working.

Any help is appreciated!

thanks!
Jason

[[Articy] Nico Probst]

Hi Jason in MN,

the plugin is a bit more low level so it scales easily to different use cases. There is no simple way to create a visual novel with it, but with a bit of coding and understanding unity its also not very difficult. One important aspect is that the plugin has no built in UI in any way. It is the Database for your articy:draft data and a convenient helper to traverse your story/dialogue flow with automatic script evaluation. What you see in maniac manfred and the debug flow player are examples of utilizing unitys UI framework to show what you can do with the plugin, but they are by no means the only or the perfect way to create a UI. If you want to use articy:draft to create your story and then use unity and our plugin to bring it to live, you will need to write the UI for it yourself. A good starting point is the unity documentation about its[url=[url=https://unity3d.com/de/learn/tutorials/s/user-interface-ui]unitys UI framework[/url]] ui framework[/url].

Hope that gets your started!

Best regards

Nico

[MikBo]

Hello,

I have the same goal... I'm planning to use this as a engine:

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/t ... ine-109302

...And maybe Articy for creating the dialogs and so on, basic flow. You could write the dialog inside the Choice-engine, but that gets messy and you lose the bigger picture really fast. I was actually just Googling for some node-based design soft (flowchart etc) that could output XML, and found this... with 30 minutes experience, it's promising although there's lot to learn...

Oh yeah, and the XML: Choice engine reads it... it's just not formatted right, but I can wrote small program to make it right, re-parse it. Example node-chunk export below. If I could fuse these two it would make my (designers) life so much easier!

Code: Select all

<loadLevelBuildSettingsIndex>0</loadLevelBuildSettingsIndex>
    <fadeOnLoading>false</fadeOnLoading>
    <customStartingNode>0</customStartingNode>
    <text_area_sensitive>true</text_area_sensitive>
    <dispawn_prev_options>true</dispawn_prev_options>
    <change_background>false</change_background>
    <DisableBackgroundImage>false</DisableBackgroundImage>
    <setBackgroundVideo>false</setBackgroundVideo>
    <requestPlayerName>false</requestPlayerName>
    <display_name>true</display_name>
    <character_name>Alice</character_name>
    <displayPlayerName>false</displayPlayerName>
    <next_is_random>false</next_is_random>
    <change_sound>false</change_sound>
    <play_once>false</play_once>
    <kill_previous_clip>false</kill_previous_clip>
    <fade>false</fade>
    <animate_sprite>false</animate_sprite>
    <loop_animation>false</loop_animation>
    <animation_spawn>0</animation_spawn>
    <animation_delay>0.1</animation_delay>
  </dialogue>
  <dialogue>
    <label>C27</label>
    <content>Anyways, how about trying to hide this annoying text window?</content>
    <node>26</node>
    <next_node>27</next_node>
    <next_node_affection_fail>0</next_node_affection_fail>
    <itemCheck />
    <next_node_item_fail>0</next_node_item_fail>
    <loadLevelOnClick>false</loadLevelOnClick>


[Jason in MN]

I'm sorry, I did not see your response until now. Have you had any success with this approach, MikBo?