A Newbie Tutorial From A Newbie

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poobunsdudley
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A Newbie Tutorial From A Newbie

Post by poobunsdudley »

I'm new to making cases here, so I thought I'd keep a record of my progression through my case, as a form of tutorial for newbs who are picking up making a case from scratch, never really having done it before. I don't really see a tutorial that covers extremely basic grounds, and hopefully I can shed some light on things. Without any resources on how to even begin, I could see how this would be difficult for a new person to pick up without any sort of information on what does what. It'll take me a while to fully develop this, as I just finished the intro to my game, but I'll go over many things as I go.

So, to start, I created the main character under the Profile tab, this being Phoenix Wright. The profile picture you use will also have all the various animations tied to them, when you actually use them in the script. I gave him the short name P. Wright, and that'll show up as his nametag in conversations. The description in both profiles and evidence will show up when you click on the icon on the right when playing the game.

I also created, via the same technique, Maya Fey and Detective Gumshoe. I went under the evidence tab, and it's fairly straightforward, I made Wright's Attorney Badge.

Now. Under the script tab, this is where the magic happens. Everything else is made here. A good start, I immedietly found, was that normally, all of the evidence and profiles will show up from that start, which you probably don't want. To change this, it's simple, but will require upkeep as you add more profiles and evidence. All you have to do is on the first frame, put wait at 1 (I'll explain why in a second), and then click action, then find Hide Evidence under the tab. The first thing that each profile and evidence has is an ID number. Just put the ID number in and click confirm, and voila, it will hide it until you put in a frame that has Reveal Evidence with the same ID number. To add more, just click add while under the hide evidence tab, so you won't need to make a new frame for each one. I did this for Gumshoe and Maya, until I introduced them later on. I set it to show on the frames that their names are first mentioned. I also did this for my defendant, who shall remain nameless until I'm further along.

The reason why you want to put a 1 pretty much in any frame that you want automatically skipped, dialogue wise, is because if left blank, the big arrow to continue will stay up until pressed. It'll take some trial and error and I won't go over everytime I use it, but I do it whenever I want a frame skipped that's just a sound effect or whatnot.

From here on, I began my intro, which is really short, but the interface makes it easy to go back and alter previous frames, or add new ones in between. By the way, all the math is done for you in reference to frames, if you have something that points to a specific frame, and that ID number changes for any reason, it will automatically update it for you upon saving your game.

In my intro I have a police officer arresting the unknown defendant. I left the image black, like you'd see in a few intros for the actual games. I threw in sound effects (Which you have to add under the audio tab, you have to use them in the script, or it won't save, so I just add them when I'm going to use them) at various points for flavor. My second frame, after the hide evidence, I started a theme song. Now there's a few things that will stay up until removed or stopped, mainly for convenience. Music will play until stopped or changed. Character animations will stay up until changed or removed. It's good to remove someone when changing scenes or else you'll have a lot of bugs. I haven't fully tested out animations, but if there's any difference, I'll edit this post. Also, backgrounds will stay up until changed or removed. There may be more, but again, I'll edit when I know.

The dialogue for my intro is quite simple. In the first frame spoken, under profile list under character, I put ??? because this allows you to have someone who isn't in your profiles speak, like my random police officer. Under shortened name, I clicked add, and wrote police officer. This is what will actually show during the dialogue. You have to do this for every frame that they speak, and for profile characters, you can just use previous picture, if you don't want their animation to change. I wrote up some dialogue between the cop and my defendant, using ??? and shortened left blank so it actually just says ??? for his name.

That's pretty much all there is to making my intro, this should allow you to get a basic start. In my next post, I'll talk about things I did to alter the conversation, and how I continued past my intro.
poobunsdudley
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Re: A Newbie Tutorial From A Newbie

Post by poobunsdudley »

So to make the conversation have a little more to it, I put various pauses and flashes and shakes, with accompanying sound effects. When you put a sound effect on, it will play at the beginning of the frame. If you want one to play in the middle of a sentence, it's a little more complicated. You have to make a new frame, and then press merge on the one above it. Basically, what this does, once you press the merge button, it will merge with the frame BELOW it. All dialogue will show up in the same box, and this enables you to change things mid sentence, like sound effects, or character animations, anything you want really.

After my intro, my next frame stops the music. After that, I start a new song, one that kinda goes with Wright's Office. For fun, I thought I'd have Maya wake up Phoenix by poking him repeatedly. I did this by making three frames and merging them together. Each frame has the sound effect wahhhh!!, and having 2 pauses and a screen shake in each frame. In the first frame of the three, I put a 1 in wait so it automatically did this without prompting. The reason I did it this way, instead of all in one frame, was because you can only have one sound effect per frame, and I wanted three.

Next, I put up animation of Maya Fey, without any text or background with a 50 ms timer just for a small gap between her showing up and my next frame. Next, I changed the character to P. Wright, and left it on previous picture. This defaults to no picture as he doesn't normally have one outside of court. You can do this with all profile characters to make them speak when they're not shown. I put in brackets what he thought about being woken up and pressed the color blue. Right, if you press a color, it'll color the entire text. If you want a seperate text blue, you have to highlight then press blue. But if you do this for a long piece of text, it will show immedietly instead of typing out slowly as usual. So, by me doing this, it showed Phoenix's text in blue, in brackets, with Maya still in the foreground with a black background, so simulate him waking up and seeing Maya right in his face. Personal thoughts of your lead characters, it's good to keep in brackets and color blue, just for differentiation.

Next frame, I put up the background for Wright's Office, which will stay there indefinetly until changed, to make it easier. In green I put the location name, date and time. It's a good habit to do this with any new location, or in the case of investigations, whenever there's a new event in that location.

I went on to change Maya's animation and have her say good morning. I went on to introduce her character through Wright's thought, and when he mentions her name, in that same frame, I put the Reveal Evidence action on, pointed it towards Maya's ID number, and now it'll show up on your profiles tab in game. So it's pretty easy to manage evidence and profiles, it's like pulling up an index card.
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Re: A Newbie Tutorial From A Newbie

Post by energizerspark »

Yeah, no offence, but there ARE tutorials for new members.
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Re: A Newbie Tutorial From A Newbie

Post by Bad Player »

There was also no reason to double post... you could just edit your original post.
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Re: A Newbie Tutorial From A Newbie

Post by poobunsdudley »

I know. And I've read them all, and honestly, as a new writer on the site, I didn't find them too terribly helpful in doing exact things. I'm trying to compile a tutorial on how to make a case from start to finish, and show how I did my work, so to speak. None of those tutorials really tell you about wait times bypassing text automatically, that animations and backgrounds and music stay up indefinetely, how to get nametags to show nonprofile characters, things like that really. So, this isn't for old members, but for people like me who had no idea how to go about doing simple things like changing text color properly or what I listed above.

Basically, please don't mind me. I feel this will join the list of tutorials, well, that's the hope anyway, because one is needed for basic usage of the editor.
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Re: A Newbie Tutorial From A Newbie

Post by poobunsdudley »

Is there a character limit on posts?
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Re: A Newbie Tutorial From A Newbie

Post by Bad Player »

I think there is, but it's really really big. If you actually hit the character limit, then I suppose double-posting wouldn't be too bad. But until then, you should stick to editing posts, rather than double-posting.

(Such as what you just did now. Again.)
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Re: A Newbie Tutorial From A Newbie

Post by energizerspark »

Well at least have some screencaps or something so newbies know EXACTLY what you're talking about.
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