Credits

Who's ready for a boring update about game credits??

I made my last visual novel in a team of 3, and in the end, the credits list was so compact that it's just one static screen in the menu:



I don't remember it being particularly hard to throw all that together. Maybe a little hard to read with the small text in Terminal font.

For this project, instead of working with a visual artist and SFX/music person, I'm using a combination of purchased asset packs and public-domain licensed assets. In a lot of cases I'm not required by individual licenses to credit the creators, but I want to. So until recently I kept a big .tsv file listing the sources and authors of every sprite, photo, sound effect, song, etc. which became quite massive and unwieldy because it's hard to get everything I need without pulling from a wide variety of sources. This also comes with a drawback that I call, in marketing speak, the "collage visual style" but my inner critic would really describe as a disjointed, unprofessional look and feel. 

So anyways, when I was done with the episode 1 demo, I had to go through the assets tsv file and manually organize and write out the credits, and write some code to scroll them as text accounting for 2- and 3-column layouts, headings, etc. so it looks like a traditional credit roll.



And after putting all that together, I realized I really, really, really never wanted to handle credits manually ever, ever again.

But that I would have to for 5 more episodes, each of which would reuse some but not all of the assets from episode 1, and so I'd have to manually go through again, cross-reference which credits to keep, which to remove, and add all the new ones. And what if I made a mistake and left someone out? I'd feel bad, not to mention in some cases potentially be violating licenses.

After some thinking, I came up with a design for a new system that would automate everything. Instead of one big .tsv file, I'd save a one-line .tsv file for each asset, and code my engine so whenever an episode loads an asset, it reads the .tsv file and stores that info to automatically insert it in the credits when they roll.

Then yesterday I had to go through my 70-line tsv file splitting everything up, verifying the info, formatting tsvs, etc. And that was probably one of my all-time least favorite gamedev experiences.

But now that I have a perfect (?) bug-free (?) automated system handling credits for me moving forward, the future is bright!



(Frame from BoJack Horseman, used here without permission.)