UI: Dialogue

The most important piece of UI for tis game is, of course, the dialogue. It is where the player will spend the most time because nearly all of the gameplay is driven by its narrative. I am still toying with the UX element of the UI to make is extremely readable and intuitive for the player, but it's shaping up nicely so far.

I used PixelCrusher's pre-made JRPG dialogue set up as a base, and I swapped out the assets with ones from my Classic RPG GUI asset pack. I really like the format of this set up because it shows a portrait of the speaker along with their name every time they have a line of dialogue. Long Italian names are really hard for American students, so I want them to be exposed to the names as much as possible so they will stick. One of my main teaching objectives is for students to know WHO was important in Medicean Florence in 1478 and WHO was involved in the Pazzi Conspiracy. I hope that exposing students to their faces and names frequently will reinforce those facts much like studying with flashcards. It's the same learning with repetition, but without the tedium. 

There are lots of things I still want to work on to make this UI better. The continue button (bottom right corner) is way too small and there is no indication of what it does right now. I don't have perfectly square portraits of all the NPCs yet, so I need to make those in Photoshop as I finalize their sprites. The font might not be as readable as I would like, the text size could be bigger, and the placement of the dialogue menu itself might be too low on the screen. You get the picture. I'm still going to play with it and keep tinkering until it is really user-friendly, but at least now I'm partway there!