I’m currently, partially, working on a proof of concept aside from my normal work. The basic idea is to create either an interactive graphic novel, or a 3D graphic adventure game (like TellTale Games) but without spoken dialog.
I’m attempting to design an interface that needs to show very stylized text and doesn’t rely on spoken dialog.
One idea is to create comic balloons. These need to adjust their shape/size according to the text inside, without distorting the borders like what happens when scaling normally.
Another idea is to use closed captioning with specific styles, colors and other markings to indicate who is speaking.
In both cases, text needs to combine regular with bold and italic text, just like in normal subtitles or comic balloons.
Normally, as far as I understand the engine, font styles (bold, etc.) are imported separately and a single textfield (at least when created in blueprint) can only use one font asset, so I don’t know how to combine them.
I prefer doing this in blueprint, but C++ isn’t a big issue, just that I don’t have experience with it.:rolleyes:
So my question is: how could I go about doing this? I don’t want someone to do it for me, I just wonder what others might think about this, and a game without spoken dialog, and what might be a way of achieving this.
P.S: I’m not planning to build an entire game by myself. It’s more for a proof of concept and perhaps an interactive graphic novel, since I’m currently trying to make a normal graphic novel and I want a more animated version of it, with music and sound effects. And since I don’t have a budget to hire voice actors, I need to find alternatives.
Two things you may want to look more into is the Paper2D system which is a Sprite based 2D system newer to the engine and if you wanted to stick to a more 3D environment you would want to look into UMG for a HUD based system. Both of these methods would allow you to create unique textures for Speech Bubbles and place them as desired around the screen. If you want to stick to a more Motion Comics look I would go with Paper2D whereas if you want to go toward a more early TellTale Games look I would focus on UMG.
OK, thanks, that’s a big help. But now I have another question, does it matter if every speech bubble has its own unique image/texture? Of course most of the backgrounds themselves can be reused, but each balloon does need unique text, so each balloon would need to be a unique paper2d sprite or UMG widget in the content browser and ingame view.
Why would a sliced sprite with rendered text not work for your needs?
Use that for the bubble, set it to render as a sliced sprite (I forget what the Unreal term for that is) and then you can scale it to any (larger) size with no distortion.
Then put some sort of text component inside of it and feed the string you want to display in.
Well, yeah, that’s what I wanted, but I couldn’t find a reference to it in UE4 (and I forgot that it was called a sliced sprite or 9-slice). But how exactly do I set it up? After some searching, I found out that prior to UMG you could only do it with Slate in C++, but can I do it now with UMG/Paper2D or not?
Absolutely available in UMG, I believe you have to create a Widget Style. Sorry, but I haven’t worked with UMG for very long so I forget exactly where it is, and it’s still a bit early so there’s not much documentation.
