Cutscenes - naelstrof/ChurnVectorSDK GitHub Wiki

Creating a cutscene

Whether you are creating the intro cutscene or a mid-game one, the workflow is fairly similar save for the steps the cutscene will define. To make this simple, this document will follow making an intro cutscene however what this describes can easily be re-purposed for others.

The canvas (For intro cutscenes)

Firstly, lets set up the empties so they look like this:

Now on the Canvas object, create a Canvas component and a Canvas Scaler component and change them to look like this:

Next up, the Backing element (this is the actual like, fade out background element)

This will already contain a Rect Transform due to being a child of the above component so just add the Canvas Renderer, Image and Canvas Group components.

Make them like this but feel free to play around and change stuff

Note that you can click on the little icon in the top left of the Rect Transform to change the type

Making briefing dialog elements

As part of the cutscene we want to tell the player what the mission is through Dialog components.

To do this, make a dialog object (not a component on an empty like above) and then for each line that you want to be displayed for that instance of dialog, add them to the list and select them from the string table.

Note that this is per step of the cutscene you are currently creating. A single Dialog object will be used per step of the cutscene list so if you want something to display multiple lines of text without moving the camera, include them in the same dialog object.

Similarly if you only want one line to display on a particular camera motion, only include that one line in the dialog.

Making the cutscene for real this time

Ok now that we have all of the pre-requisites out of the way lets actually make the cutscene.

Using the Cutscene empty mentioned above (make one now if you don't have it) add the Cutscene Player script and change its Trigger Event to "LevelStart".

The LevelStart event is always raised at the start of a level so we can use this to trigger the cutscene. Likewise if we wanted a cutscene to play mid-level you can raise your own event through something like a button press to trigger a cutscene this way.

Cutscene "scenes" have a bunch of elements and values to fill out. Most of these should be self explanatory (and in some cases may require the same thing more than once) but for the purposes of this guide we will run through making a basic fade in cutscene.

First up, let take a look at an example cutscene set up to fade out the background, play some dialog with camera movements and then finish. Its a long list so element 3 exists twice to show where the images join.

Lets go through these in order.

Element 0 is the background fade out that happens prior to the dialog being displayed. (using the backing element)

Element 1 is the trigger to start the briefing music:

Element 2 plays the first dialog set while orbiting the player. Note that the character loader is the target loader here

Element 3 is a little different in that its orbiting an NPC which means they may be walking around and the camera needs to follow them. This element needs the same loader defined twice.

Element 4 is instead orbiting a pivot (empty with a pivot component) to keep the camera in place while displaying text.

Element 5 ends the briefing and ceases the intro music