Doing cutscenes flexibly.
The camera handles cutscenes by loading up a text file with simple stageplay instructions. Each instruction has a set type (dialogue change, resume-gameplay, and level end), letting me do all that fun mid-stage dialogue, start, and ending. I'd like to add one to move/show/hide portrait actors, that way I can do stuff like swap characters around in them, but the important thing is I have it now.
Tying it to a central object also means activating it only needs a destroy-on-update object that advances the cutscene stageplay instruction by one, into a dialogue selection (there's a flag to track if the player is in a cutscene, so even if they can move, there's still a pseudo-pause happening.
Demonstration below. Portrait is Fable 4, because I had that laying in my images.
You'll notice the nameplates change character names too. That was intentional to show off that it's one thing changing and moving around, instead of a name for each actor. Then again I might want to change that later...
