Okay, time to think about how the screen will work. First we need to think about a resolution.
While I’ve said Everyone’s Detective is meant to be spiritually a Nintendo DS game, I’m gonna take some liberties when it comes to the look.
For starters I’ll use a bigger resolution. Perhaps not quite HD game, but definitely not anywhere near the DS or 3DS. For context, the DS had a resolution of 256×192 and the 3DS had a resolution of 400 x 240 on the top and 320 x 240 on the bottom.
Even outside of the regular limitations of screen real estate that come with that size, there’s a couple of other factors that will become relevant in brief. So for now let’s take a 16:9 resolution like 1280 x 720.
Fun fact 1: VA-11 Hall-A exists natively at 640 x 360 and is then upscaled by a factor of 2.
Fun Fact 2: I wanted to make a joke by adding the Aspect Raito image with Light Yagami crunched horizontally but couldn’t find it.
Having established that, let me tell you about the first design detail to consider
The way the screen real estate will be divided is so each half is assigned roughly to each side of a conversation, and I say “roughly” because it’s not a hard divide, there will be no line in-between both for example.
This setup will also make extra sense when I explain another detail in a second. Also, the setup itself should actually be familiar since it’s how a few games were sectioned at the time. Phoenix Wright might be the first that comes to mind for most, but even Hotel Dusk had that configuration.
Which takes me to another technical aspect, a bigger resolution allows for sprites that are more zoomed out. Though a protip for anyone that actually wants to evoke the DS aesthetic more faithfully: Zoomed in sprites were super common due to all the limitations with size.
Though the look we’re striving for is one with sprites that go more from the waist up, something more in the vein of The World Ends With You.
Anyway, back to the screen size and sectioning and whatnot. With that sectioning in mind.
We divide each half to add the anchor points for each “slot” as it were.
The NPC side will have the space to allocate up to three NPCS, though most of the time it will either be one or two. If it’s the former it’ll use slot 1, and if it’s the latter it’ll use slots 2 and 3.
On the protagonist side, however, it’s better to have the anchor point be divided into eighths.
Which takes me to the next point that I’ve been preambling for a bit: Let’s consider the size of the second screen.
As I’ve mentioned in the other logs, the second screen should be of a size that can be nested inside of the main screen. And a main character on protagonist slot 1 will always be present there at bare minimum.
So we take it from the last eighth.
Let’s illustrate how it’s supposed to look in practice with some premade sprites.
…actually, the menu is too much. Let’s reduce it to half of the screen.
And let’s add a background for illustrative purposes
Perfect, so let’s say you choose to talk to an NPC.
The menu will be pushed aside revealing the other NPC.
This is a simplified version of things. In theory “talk” would then branch into “chat” and “ask” for example.
Though plotting it all like this, if the menu is going to be a more perennial presence, opting for a setup like VA-11 Hall-A’s where the UI is on-screen at all times might be a better approach as opposed to having a menu pop up every 10 seconds after a conversation is done.
This sounds so obvious considering that the idea is to follow up on what I did on VA-11 Hall-A KIDS but on a bigger scale and that that one had things figured out even if just through stylistic choices.
That’s for next session, the last element I wanna bring up is that I want there to be a Look command too that takes place entirely on that second screen, something akin to this:
I think you can picture how this would work with a second screen, and also notice the evident issues with the current approach.
I’d say super valuable progress was just made by thinking about this all in practical terms, but it also means that last session’s list doesn’t change and one item is added to it.
- Draft the UI and player screen. This will determine the resolution of the game also.
The “second screen” should have a size that fits within a single screen.- It should ideally be a solution where an always-on-screen UI is present.
- Add the mockup into the game.
- Create an option where the “second screen” spawns as either a window or a regular UI element depending on the play mode selected.
The public side of the log ends here.