Unity Creating an Interactive Story Engine - Giantess stories and similar themes - [Dev Thread]

[Keliadom]

An Interactive Story Engine?

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What's this about? Well... read on! There's a dev diary with images following this wall of text.

What is the Interactive Story Engine about?
While at first I intend this to be mostly about having normal stories experienced with additional content (such as maybe ambience sounds when relevant, some ambient images here and there and perhaps additional side notes), I would love to eventually have the whole thing be able to fully support player choices to create more complex story paths, with small inventory management and player/story stats.

Why not use Ren'Py or other similar engines?
Just a matter of preference. I'm not a big fan of the visual novel style (no offense intended to those that do, it certainly has its pluses), and beside, I'm imagining something much more subtle. I still want the text to be the main character of this engine, with the rest being a nice proper addition. Also it probably boils down to I know Unity and it's inner workings, and I don't know other game engines well. So I'm going with the tool I know.

What type of stories are we talking about?
The stories will feature 18+ content centering around Giantess growth, Breasts expansion, Muscle growth and other transformation adjacent fetishes. For a better idea, visit my

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.

It's quite probable that should this project succeed, it opens up to other genre such as Futanari, m/m or f/f/.

What is planned for now
Here's a quick list of the features I will be working on for the first prototype:

• *Basic story presentation (not choice driven)
  *Save and load
  *Support multiple modern resolutions
  *A code architecture to support the implementation of new content
  *Implement appropriate sound and visual ambiance

What is planned for the future
If interest in this project materialize and with proper funding, I would be able to devote more time for the following, more complex features:

Certainly:

• *Branching choices allowing for multiple fetishes to be explored
  *Having choices influence the dialogue and events

Depends/Possible:

• *Small inventory management, mostly to open up new events and paths.
  *An interactable 3D environment.

Keliadom, can you really do this?
I'll just say: yes this isn't too hard. Just very time intensive.

There is a

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if you want to support this project and follow future dev diaries. The payments are paused until the first free demo is released. Feel free to join up just to follow the early development, I don't mind!

 

[Keliadom]

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Dev Diary I
In the beginning

For this first diary, I'll try and outline what I have in my head to you in the best of my capacity. I've been wanting to have a framework for a while in which I could create stories and have them contain some sensory elements to the benefit of the readers, such as appropriate music, sounds, images and so on. This is an attempt at creating something like this. Eventually, I would love to have the ability to move this from simple sensory addons to a full on interactive experience, where you the reader/player could be included in the story, and have the choices/direction taken influence the outcome.

I know there are already a lot of Visual Novel frameworks out there, like Ren'py or other similar. These, though, are further from the image I have in my head. This is a hopefully successful attempt at making that vision a reality.

If you haven't done so already, please read the about section of the patreon. There is a lot of info in there on where I want to take this


Let's talk visuals

For now, I've been toying with the interface a bit, and the book didn't make it for me, so we're going digital with an eReader. I also wanted to leave some space on the screen so that there will be place for additional information (imagine photographs hanging about (for added imagery similar to the small banners I include in my stories) or maybe a post it note with the scribbled size of Zhang Ran from

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(hint hint)) Basically lots of possibilities abound.

The concept of screen space and the positioning of objects is an important one when it comes to the feel of the game. We often time take for granted how designers (which I'm not!) configure the elements in the interface of a game. Here, I found myself strangely weirded out by reading from left to right, and having my eye stumble upon the empty space of the table after each line. So I ended up switching the reader around, and the space I had in mind for imagery to the left.

It feels much better


That's it for now really. Right now I'm in the process of integrating and formatting the first short story that will serve as testing ground for the first prototype of the Interactive Story Engine,

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.

Join me next time for a dev diary, which won't be a rant at all, on formatting text for games

 

[Keliadom]

That's it for the starting post. I'll of course be following this thread as often as possible. I know there's a shit ton of good content out there done with already really good programs by proper coders.

But hopefully I'll be building a little something extra for others to enjoy.

 

[Keliadom]

Importing and formatting for Unity - Dev Diary 2

Finished importing and formatting

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the other day.

Game engines are not text editors like Word or GoogleDoc and as such you need to be careful writing the proper amount of characters that will need to be fit inside whichever area the text appear in. It's basically a very clunky notepad. Old games used to have very simple stories because of this, where you would have at most the possibility of small phrases to fit inside small text boxes.

Nowadays, the possibilities are much more broad: Unity allows you to play with Font size, paragraph alignments, colors, etc. right out of the box (almost). In the end, this is how I had to portion the story of Surpassing the O-Zone: I split it in in 4 parts, according to story beats, and then organized the entire schematics so I wouldn't go insane. Each part had to be measured against the template of the "eReader" to make sure everything fit nicely.

Like I said: it's clunky, but it works. There are ways to reduce the amount of overhead you have to do for each segment of your story. Something simple like a scrollbar where if the text overflow its bounds, you simply scroll down for the rest. But honestly, I did not like the look of it. So, for now, everything is on its own page.

Right now though, it seems that things will be straightforward for the adaptations of my other stories. The real meat of this entire endeavor will be whenever a story eventually introduces elements of choice.
Upcoming next: visual interactions.

 

[Tompte]

Looks neat! Systems like these can benefit a lot from having some way of importing/exporting the text, like serializing to either XML, JSON or plain text. That way users can pull all the text out to do simple things like word search, spell checking or just editing in their favorite text editor. And when they're done, they could just import the changes.

Like, at work we use a commercial Unity-native solution for localization and I would not use that thing in a million years if it didn't have the capability of syncing all the phrases with a Google spread sheet. That way we almost never need use the Unity inspector text fields for serious work.

As for my game, it isn't a narrative game but it has a lot of text in it, well over a thousand entries organized in several xml files. I do most of my writing/editing in Notepad++. It's not a perfect solution but it's a net win overall. I can reload all text with a button press while playing the game, which means I can edit and see the results instantly.

 

[Keliadom]

Looks neat! Systems like these can benefit a lot from having some way of importing/exporting the text, like serializing to either XML, JSON or plain text. That way users can pull all the text out to do simple things like word search, spell checking or just editing in their favorite text editor. And when they're done, they could just import the changes.

Like, at work we use a commercial Unity-native solution for localization and I would not use that thing in a million years if it didn't have the capability of syncing all the phrases with a Google spread sheet. That way we almost never need use the Unity inspector text fields for serious work.

As for my game, it isn't a narrative game but it has a lot of text in it, well over a thousand entries organized in several xml files. I do most of my writing/editing in Notepad++. It's not a perfect solution but it's a net win overall. I can reload all text with a button press while playing the game, which means I can edit and see the results instantly.

I would looooove to eventually be able to implement a way for the results to be shown instantly in the editor through something as simple as a notepad file. I'll definitely be looking into it when I get some time.

By the way thanks a lot for the perspective. Game making is hard, and some of us are more amateurs than others (cough -me- cough), and any sort of institutional info is extremely appreciated.

 

[Tompte]

By the way thanks a lot for the perspective. Game making is hard, and some of us are more amateurs than others (cough -me- cough), and any sort of institutional info is extremely appreciated.

Isn't it? I usually try to be careful with what I say to beginners because I don't want it to come off as if there's only one way of doing something or if you're not doing it the "right" way you're wasting your time, because that's not true. I think from your first screenshots you showed that you're taking it seriously and that's all you can ask for, really.

I'm a big believer in letting people just try to come up with their own solutions first. Because, and this goes against what they teach you in school, you don't actually know what you're making until you start making it, y'know? People who say otherwise are usually wrong. Things never go as planned anyhow. It's only once you've started that you learn what the actual challenges are. You have to start somewhere. Getting the ball rolling is the important part and then steering it this or other way and pushing it over obstacles is what development IS.

So my two cents were mainly: this looks cool. keep going. consider serialization to a file, in the future or whenever - but don't sweat it.