When a character is speaking softly, the “small mouth” sprite is shown. When a character is making a lot of noise, the “big mouth” image is shown. Incidentally, it seems like the folks over at Sierra went one step further and displayed different mouth sizes based on the volume of the characters’ speech. This is achieved by monitoring the volume levels coming out of the voice channel. If the character takes a long pause in between words or sentences, the lips stop smacking. Instead of playing the animation indiscriminately, we only play it when the volume of the speech becomes audible to human ears. This is a variation of the “Lip Smacking” method. The shapes the mouth makes don’t match the dialogue. It’s actually quite jarring seeing a person’s mouth move when they’re supposed to be pausing in between words. This is a step up from having no animation.
While they chose not to animate the portraits, they did swap out the faces based on the emotions they sought to convey.
Nobody said we had to animate these dang portraits. To that end, we came up with a few options: Option #1: No Animation Anyway, seeing our characters’ portraits seemed like a good idea. We’ll look at the clouds together and you’ll say to me, “Eric, I see an elephant up there.” I cast my gaze skyward, and by god, I see an elephant up there too. One thing humans are very good at is pattern recognition. We always felt that having our characters’ faces visible during dialogue would be a powerful tool to leverage as we attempt to ground our players in the emotions of the story. There’s certainly a lot to say about the decisions we made with respect to our dialogue system, but what I’d really like to focus on, as I subtly intimated in the lede, are the animated talking portraits. After all, why not learn from our contemporaries? After all, why not learn from our elders? We also looked at more modern games like Celeste, Unavowed, Oxenfree, and The Walking Dead. We looked at old classics like Monkey Island, Grim Fandango, and King’s Quest. One of the first things we did as we began to design the dialogue system for Voodoo Detective was to research how other games had handled their dialogue. I want to talk about how we animate our characters’ portraits in Voodoo Detective.
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