The very first part of the game that I decided to start working on, since I had a feeling it would be the most involved, was the interrogations – the portions of the game where you listen to a character talk about a subject, press them for more details or to get a reaction from them, and then present them with evidence to expose a lie if they’re making one.  That portion of the game engine is more or less complete at this point, and I’ve put up a video demonstrating the gameplay for this part of the game after the break.

More info after the break.

One of the things I really, really liked about the Ace Attorney series was the timing of the text display – it added pauses and slow-downs for effect, which made it very easy to read the text as one would hear it spoken, instead of just displaying it all from left to right without any pauses – and I’ve tried to have a similar feel to the textual display in this game as well.

The conversation itself was defined using (at least in my opinion) a very intuitive conversation declaration pattern that I designed myself for this game engine, which looks (in part) like this:

Currently this is all hard-coded in the game, but before long I hope to make it so that a source file like the above can be compiled into a conversation object that the game can then interact with.

I should note that my video recording software doesn’t (at least as far as I know) enable the recording of any visual feedback for mouse clicks, so you’ll have to mentally fill that in.  Clicking in empty space either moves to the next line of dialog, if the current one is completely displayed, or causes the current line of dialog to be completed, if it’s still being displayed.

I should also note at this point that this scenario, although it comes from an idea that I have in mind for my short, first case in the game, is largely simply a testing ground for the game engine at this point.  The final version of the first case may or may not include this interrogation, and if it does, it may or may not resemble this version.

Finally, I should note that, as I said in my previous post, both the visuals and the audio seen in this video are tentative – I’ve put them up just so I can have something to look at and hear while testing out the game engine.  The final product may look and sound quite different.