Arguably the whole point of the game is on display here; switching between two different languages in the same conversation. Whereas before I had hardcoded text into some .uasset files, now the conversation, which was created in a separate tool (to be featured soon) is loaded from easily editable text files at run time. The text files contain the text of the conversation and the data obtained from parsing the text, like the morphemes listed in the middle of the screen.
A conversation is composed of a series of connected ‘chunks’, the flow of which determines the flow of the conversation. Since a conversation will be experienced in at least 2 languages at time, each chunk in one language is correlated to one or more chunks in the other language. The point is not to just equate words one to one from one language to another, so correlated chunks may come at different orders and be of differing length depending on how the conversation flows in a given language.
Note the debug data detailing the current state of the conversation is on the left, which updates as the conversation progresses. A conversation is one of the object types implementing an interface called IExaminable, which has been great for debugging on screen and in logs.
The text and dialogue is one of the most important parts of this game. Players need to feel like it is a part of the fabric of the world, rather than something to mash the confirm button through until there is more thwacking or exploring to do. As such it will go through a fair bit of iteration, and that starts with a best effort to get all of the information on screen in an engaging way.
The conversation is saved in chunks as assets, which are linked together by conversations, which are also assets.
The player can switch between two different languages at any time in the conversation. Note that the animation for switching languages is different from the one for advancing through the conversation. The animations themselves are not final.
The list of words in the current chunk of text can be interacted with.
Next steps include staples with new school twists like dynamic character portraits and conversation playback, along with more game specific features like player generated word lists and graded conversations. Most importantly though will be something that I ( and crucially, people who can write convincing dialogue in various languages) can use to create and edit conversations.