The Three Stupid Body Problem

Description:

The Three Stupid Body Problem is a short visual novel.

At first, I wanted to work on a visual novel template that could be reused to create different stories. I rapidly found myself stuck and in order to understand what tools I needed for my template, I decided to create a small visual novel, allowing me to understand the needs for such a production.

Credits:

All visuals and audios that aren't mine are free to use and referenced below. 

Visuals:

Pictures found on Pexels:

The livingroom -> Vecislavas popa

The corridor -> Max Rahubovskiy

The bedrom -> M&W Studios 

The diary -> DomJ

The entrance -> Max Vakhtbovycn

Pictures found on Unsplash:

The restroom -> Giorgio Trovato

The balcony -> Francesca Tosolini

The heart effect -> freestocks

The office -> Collov Home Design

Sounds:

Soudtracks "A minor distraction", "beach vibes", "smooth driving" -> JD Sherbert

UI sfx -> ColorAlpha 50 Menu interface sfx

Soundtrack "3 critical"  -> Sara Garrard

Soundtrack "Stream Loops 2024-03-30_02" -> Abstraction 

Sounds found on Pixabay:

Keyboard sound -> SennaFoxy

Cat sfx and all other sfx

Code related:

To fix the aspect ratio and handle the full-screen behavior of the build project I used the repository of wmjoers.

To set up the audio management I followed the tutorial of Renaissance Coders. Afterward, I added little modifications to fit my needs.

Challenges

The langage

For this project, I wanted to have the possibility to change the language, It was pretty challenging to build complete system allowing you to do so at any moment in the game. All the UIs had to change at runtime, and the story files needed to switch from one language to the other.

I created a script attached directly on text UIs that needed to be translated. Doing so, an event could trigger the translation of all the UIs in the scene.

Each story file contains both translations, if the player wanted to switch the language, the script changes the position in the referenced file of the displayed text.

The saving system

The story of this project is short enough that the player don't really need to save his progress tho I wanted to work on a saving system like in commercialized games, with the possibility of having multiple saving slots. The difficulty was to keep track of where the player is in the story line and particularly what soundtrack was played at this defined moment.

I made a global data saving for the general parameters like the language, the volume and the screen display.

I made a saving file for each save slot containing the current game data which are: the name of the story (in order to find the path of the dialogue files ) ; the position in the story line and in the dialogue file, to know where in the dialogue the player is and finally the current soundtrack that will be played when the player resumes the game.

When starting a new game, the player chooses the saving slot with the option to crush a previous save that they don't want to keep.

Conclusion

I've learned tons of new things doing this project :

• how to save multiple games files.
• how to make sound and visuals fit specific lines of dialogue.
• how to add customization in the dialogue display (tiping speed, automatic display...).

I've had a lot of fun making my cats the main characters of my pointless story.

And now I know what it takes to make a really simple and basic visual novel.

Thank you for going through all my explanation and if you tried the game feel free to give me your opinion!

ps: No, there won't be a sequel, I just like the idea of finishing the story with "to be continued...".