Emotes

[Fireserpent]

I'm curious if there's any 'standard' when adding emotions in dialogue in VNs...

What I'm currently doing is something like this:

Code: Select all

sha "*grins at you* So, you're ready then?"

It seems to flow more than going:

Code: Select all

"She grins at you."
sha "So, you're ready then?"

Another problem with the second one is that I use character portraits with the dialogue, so if I just use the narrator "She grins at you." The face will disappear, since it doesn't specify with character that's being used.. Yet at the same time. if I do add the character prefix for an emote, in this case 'sha', then it will appear as if she is speaking the emote rather than doing it..

For long emotes, I definitely prefer to use some sort of narrator, since it should have it's own dialogue screen, but for shorter emotes, I like it connected with the line being said..

Anyone out there got a good 'system' for this, including when using a character portrait next to the lines?

[Aleema]

I think the standard is to show that kind of emotion with a sprite's graphic. If it's an important beat in the dialogue, in that it's really important that she smiled, then having it in the narration is really no problem. I'd personally prefer no internet markup in VN dialogue, so I can't give a good suggestion on protocol, other than to make them all italics inside parenthesis, like in stage scripts.

Do your sprites not have different emotions?

[Fireserpent]

Yeah. I do have different emotions. But sometimes I want more subtlety.. like a warm smile, or a coy smile, or playful grin. But I don't necessarily want to have a new sprite for all of those..

How do you do it in narration if there's more than one character? Do you usually just enter the name of the character? Like "Shaara chuckles and shakes her head, while Peter cringes and looks away.", etc...