Aphelion

A big part of a story driven game is, well, story. It had to be told in some way, which we wanted to be told by unintrusive dialogue audio in addition to text, for those without any way to hear audio.
Because of time constraints, we ended up scrapping the voiceovers, but felt that the subtitles would suffice.

I took on the task to create a well functional subtitle system, and had a sit down with the artist and the level designer who would write the story.
After we decided what features were wanted and a quick sketch on how the editor interface should look, I went to work.

I created a basic mockup of the editor in a C# WinForms application and let a level designer use it, taking notes of things he found unintuitive meanwhile.

I now had the basics of the editor interface, and what data would be accessible. First of all, I decided to create the binary file format and then to implement it into the game. In hindsight, the binary format could have been done a whole lot better.

After having created a sample binary file using a hex editor, seeing it work in the game, the only thing left was to make the editor be able to load and save them and a way for our level designers to trigger the subtitles from our trigger system.