Ducky's Delivery Service's story improvements [VIDEO]
Cutscene UI improvements
Whenever you could continue to the next line in a cutscene, it would show a picture of the "OK" button for your current input device in the bottom right corner. It would show the Enter key if you were using a keyboard, the A button if you were using an Xbox controller, and so on.
I wasn't a huge fan of how this looked, so I replaced it with an animated arrow. The text now appears one character at a time too, instead of just all appearing at once. These two small changes make a big difference!
Writing improvements
The story writing in Ducky's Delivery Service was serviceable, by action game standards. But I don't have any creative writing experience at all, and it really showed. It kind of felt like the characters were all just relaying the plot to you in a default tutorial voice.
I asked NomnomNami (who also drew the game's promo art!) for some feedback on the writing. I expected to get a few small suggestions, but I ended up getting so many ridiculously useful tips and changes that she's now credited as a Script Editor. I can't thank her enough!
Here's one of the early story scenes, before and after I got help:
There were other scenes in the game that had much, much worse writing than this before NomnomNami stepped in to help, but I can't bring myself to show them here. So trust me when I say that the writing is now significantly better across the board!
After she finished helping me, NomnomNami wrote this cohost post with general tips for game writers. Check it out if you're at all interested in writing videogame stories! Everyone's taste in videogame writing is different of course, but all of advice in that post was super useful for a beginner like me. The old version of the Ducky's Delivery Service script ignored every single one of those tips, oops...
Anyway, that's my week. I'm currently writing up all the translator notes for all of the text in my game, and then I'm going to send it off to translators and start adding sound effects to the game. Let me know what you think of the new cutscene improvements, and I'll see you next week!