Last Dream 1 and World Unknown brought classic RPGs into the modern era, keeping the things that made them great and upgrading things that were outdated. Most of the polish went into the combat, classes, leveling, and storytelling. Graphically, we had plenty of custom costumes and some custom sprites. But one thing we did not have was our own “look and feel”. Here’s a screenshot of Last Dream 1’s message boxes. While serviceable, they are clearly from one of RPG Maker’s community plugin sets, and thus there are a lot of games with this same style.
For Last Dream 2, we wanted polished, customized message boxes that allowed our fans to instantly identify our style. This also had benefits for storytelling, as you’ll see later.
The message boxes in Last Dream 2 started as the default RPG Maker MV style:
(Ignore the long-ness of these –we hadn’t fixed our resolution yet.) We actually re-designed the Main Menu before doing message boxes (that’ll be another post), which led to the following weird message boxes (since both Message Boxes and Menus used the same background):
Anyway, we needed a custom style for the message boxes, so I whipped up something truly outrageous, just to get the conversation flowing:
All these message boxes still felt very intrusive and confusing. For example, in the screenshot above, who is the Exasperated Captain? You can tell from his outfit, but why can’t the message box give you a hint? We wanted a message box that would help craft the story we wanted to tell.
At this point, my thoughts went immediately to an abandoned project from the Sky Tower Games community forums (a web page so old it was never archived). Back then, we were using RPG Maker 2000, but I still managed to script something cool with just Events:
It’s pretty clear who’s talking now, thanks to the “stem” pointing to the hero. Also, the message box doesn’t cover more of the screen than it has to. What if we took these two ideas and incorporated them into Last Dream 2?
Combined with a style redesign, we got a pretty nice result:
The message boxes also “squish” open, which looks nice:
Message boxes can be 1 to 4 lines in height, and they can be either full-width or half-width. They can also appear anywhere (although we’ll typically only show them above a character who is speaking).
The brown message boxes looked nice on most backdrops; unfortunately, many of our interior town maps are wooden buildings, so we had to change the color. We went through a few more iterations, and ended up at a gray message box:
Message Box style is a tale as old as time (or at least the 1980s), so let us know in the comments what game has your favorite message box style!
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