Treasure Chest Animations In Equica

     You know what I'm talking about. When you go up to a chest in A Link to the Past and hold up an item while fanfare plays. I want that in Unicorn Quest. It just feels good! I had the chest sprites made and I even got the spinning white action bubble from my Feed The Plant trophy screen to emphasize the item being held up. Clover will open a chest with a chest icon over the action button, then face the camera and hold up the prize for all to see! Trust me, it'll be adorable.

     I got all the code and art for this done and just need to finish the textbox system to have a way of telling players what the item is and making the prompt disappear.

Colored, Bold, Etc. Text Made Easy!

     Did you know about this? Well I didn't! Apparently Unity isn't done surprising me with it's ease of use! I finally learned what the Rich Text check box does and boy does it make my life easier. Here I was about to code up a system similar to HTML's text modifiers and as I'm googling to see if someone else has already invented that wheel I stumble across this! Unity had that stuff in it all along! Just add "<b>words here</b>" or something similar for fantastic results!

     Now I can highlight words mid-sentence with no trouble! I'm not even limited to certain colors or sizes either. It basically works like HTML. I can probably do varied word sizes too which would allow me to fill the text box with screams of "NOOO!!!" if I want to. All this stuff is really great and further proves to me that I still have a world's worth of knowledge to learn.

Choosing A Pixel RPG Font

Here's how the textbox looks so far.

      I'm searching for just the right font for this game's pixel art style. I chose Myraid Web Pro Bold first because it looked best from my options in MS Paint. After looking at other RPGs and this game's style as a whole I'm thinking about changing all the fonts to a pixelated one of some kind. I'm considering the font on the 4th row in the picture above, 8BitOperator. It comes with lowercase letters, it squeezes characters together for more space, and its punctuation marks are equal in size to capital letters.

What I Want In A Text Box

       I need an efficient speech bubble system like you see in tons of RPGs for my games. Unfortunately there are not many templates for one floating out there (either that or I can't find them) so I need to make one for myself. I need to make something that separates text into 3 or 4 lines, allows for color coded words like you see above, and automatically extend the number of pages based on how many lines of text are required. I'd also like it to spit out each character one at a time with a beep matching either a male, female, really high, or really low pitch.

      I'm skipping out on certain things that seem really difficult to pull of for the time being like shaking letters, bold & italics, changing fonts, auto language adjustments, and varied font size. If I do this properly, I may be able to add those features in as I get better at this whole game development thing (or meet someone who's good at it and wants to work with me).

       It'll take up a large chunk of time but this is worth the effort. I can reuse and refine this textbox system for use in the absurd amount of games in my mind. I better be careful now to make a strong and cleanly coded foundation or else I risk making a mess for myself and any people I decide to work with.