Post by Team Robo in Tomorrow Will Be Dying comments

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Ah, thank you so much for the feedback! It's great to receive some tips for the UI; all of your suggestions sound great! Small indents and then spacing between long paragraphs should be simple enough to implement. As for padding the textbox — just to clarify: you meant to add more empty space between the borders of the textbox and text? If so, that sounds good as well!

For the text: we did want to differentiate the dialogue from narration since singular textboxes often combine the two and, with the arrow and name tags, we didn't want to confuse readers as to when the character is actually speaking vs the narration. With that said, we will certainly consider an option to disable the effect, and/or look into other ways to differentiate between narration and dialogue contained in a single box.

As for the narrative itself, we can only hope that the full experience will fully justify this prologue's existence, but that remains to be seen (though, being able to receive this feedback justifies it on the dev side of things, hehe). There isn't a lot of time left, so the possibility of getting beta testers beyond our editors and then implementing their feedback is a little iffy, but, as you say, it's probably a good idea. We'll look into this a bit more and see what we can do!

We really appreciate you letting us in on your overall impressions — we'll be sure to take them into account moving forward. We may or may not be adjusting this release just yet, but the prologue will be featured as optional side content in the main game and should have any of the aforementioned fixes for anyone who misses out on it here.

Thank you for your support and well-wishes, that means the world to us!

cairirie1 year ago(+1)

😊 Haha thanks, it’s nice to know that the team is receptive and takes feedback seriously.

Oh, that was what I meant by padding the textbox, but it was also just off the top of my head, my suggestions are only just that of course, it's up to the team to decide what works best in the end! :)

When you mention that you’d be seeing how to fit dialogue and narration into one text box, I can’t help but wonder, why not give them their own spaces in individual text boxes, rather than trying to cram them both into one most of the time? Not to create an entirely new text box each for dialogue and narration, but that dialogue can be more reserved for the text box with arrows that points to the character speaking along with the name tags, and narration used more in the text box without the arrows.

The instances where the prologue demo did this (such as Regular Textbox: [Narration only] >> Arrow Textbox: [Name tag] + [Dialogue only] >> Arrow Textbox: [Name tag] + [Dialogue only] >> Regular Textbox: [Narration only]), even if it’s rather few, were the most immersive moments at least for me because reading flowed well alongside the character expressions. This is in contrast to instances like “Regular Textbox: [Narration about Eri jerking up] >> Arrow Textbox [Saki’s Dialogue] >> [Saki’s Name tag pops up]”. The Arrow textbox merging with the prior Regular Textbox feels incongruent with the starting narration of Eri which now has Saki’s name tag at the top. It may be better for the player to take in the narration of Eri jerking back in its own regular text box, and then encounter Saki’s dialogue next. There are certainly a lot more nuances that go into this, each moment would be different according to what is needed to convey their effect, but the most important bit is discerning the tempo of reading through textboxes and how it affects the player’s experience (which is why beta testers, or anyone really, who can see how all these elements come together might be handy). The game just needs to spread out the dialogue and narration text to prevent clogging up a single text box.

Nevertheless, I also completely understand the limitations of what can be done at this stage given that the release date is drawing near and I definitely don’t wish to add more to the plate. I get the sense that the text seems fine on paper, but when translated into visual novel mode, it becomes tricky to mold it into the game's design. Understandably, the comic-panel style of TWBD doesn’t fit in the ‘traditional’ VN model of standard text box at the bottom for both dialogue and narration so it’s an extra challenge. Indie development is tough, so if there isn’t enough time to fully consider everything, it’s alright if the game’s textual format stays as it is (I only hope for at least the option to have the text be consistently at full opacity as it gets harder to read over time). Thanks for considering my comments, and hang in there!⭐

Team Robo1 year ago (1 edit) (+1)

Understood and noted!

We went in knowing visual novels don't often have dialogue tags, but did end up throwing them in as fans of regular novels. As a result, we've just made this a just a tiny bit harder than it needed to be for ourselves! At the end of the day, though, it's really no problem — we're still in the process of editing/implementing, so we'll keep it in mind to try to split the dialogue from the narration when we can, especially for moments like the one you described (different subjects, etc). Readability is absolutely key!

Thank you again, we really appreciate it!

itch.io

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