TSL Speech Bubbles

[cherubim]

Hey can anyone tell me how TSL made the speech bubbles for the French dog when he speaks? I'm making a first person adventure game and am trying to make them so that my characters can speak. I'm a horrible voice actor and I like the comic style of the speech bubbles rather than having an unaesthetic gui box. Please help me!

[snabbott]

I think that would depend a lot on what game engine you are using. TSL Ep1-4 was made in Torque; we're using Unity these days (huge improvement imo).

[cherubim]

Yeah I'm completely new to game development. I'm using Unity version 3.5.6, in fact the only reason I chose to use Unity to make my game is because I heard TSL was going to use it for episode 5. I like adventure games, and there's something missing that I figure I'll fulfill myself. I plan to use comics in place of animations simply because I cannot create decent animations. I want that theme consistent so I need a speech bubble for my game.

So it would be greatly appreciated if anyone can tell me how to do that or any tips.

[snabbott]

I'm sure someone more experienced around here could give some suggestions. Also, a quick search turned up a couple of possibilities:

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/42215-Making-Cartoon-Speech-Bubbles
http://www.41post.com/4545/programming/unity-how-to-create-a-speech-balloon

For something more specific, you might try the Unity developer forums. A lot of times when I'm searching for how to do something, I find an answer there. If there isn't already an answer, you can post one.

[cherubim]

Thanks Snabbott! I was hoping to get a POS developer to explain how they did it, but if not I'll probably use one of these methods.

[wilco64256]

Heh it's been so long since those were first implemented I'm not 100% sure that any of us still remember for sure how it was done (or the person who originally created them isn't around any more, I can't say for sure either way) but my guess would be that it's just an animated texture that quickly expands when needed with a text object over the top of it that's populated through code.

[Rick_Florez]

Yeah, they we're a bunch of pre-made textures done by one of our artists that we're then applied to 2 dimensional planes and displayed at the correct time.

Luckily he did not have much to say so that method worked for us.  You would need something a little bit more advanced if you we're using it for a full game.

Most likely it would be a GUI element you would put on top of the screen or maybe 3D text like they have in Unity.

You can find nice comic book style fonts if you look on the internet, that's what we did for both the TSL bubbles and Cognition.

[cherubim]

Thanks for the info! Yeah I currently use the free font Anime Ace, which seems to be for translated Japanese comic books or manga.