Beta 2 Game Dev Saga - Processes and challenges of a Brazilian Game Development Studio

Part 2) The I.T. Guy and Beta 2’s Dialogue System

“Coding games is like art for me.”, says Lucas Soares Dornelles, one of our programmers.

Last time I talked to you guys I was dwelling on spreadsheets, words, and teamwork.

That made me think (and I’ve been doing this thinking thing a lot these days) about who else from the team finds intriguing stuff in banalities.

As I was talking to one of them, Lucas Dornelles, he uttered that one single sentence I highlighted above.

Not sure what he was talking about, instead of smiling and waving, I decided to ask, which led to a very nice conversation about how he started in the game development industry.

“The Boss was my twin brother’s classmate in college. We used to hang around together and all.

“One day we talked and The Boss, before being my boss, invited me to code a game for a jam, the Extra Credits Game Jam, in 2019, I guess.”

Lucas majored in mechanical engineering but never worked as one.

In his last semesters in college, he decided to study programming on his own, especially numeric simulations.

“When The Boss called me, I thought it would be a very nice way to develop my skills and to get some experience coding as part of a team.

“So, we engaged on a game called Slingshot Climbers. It was fun. We performed fairly well on the Jam.

“Funny thing was both of us didn’t know what I was capable to do (lol). And I have never, ever, thought about working in the game industry.”

We are from the 80’s/90’s. Programming, or even thinking about working with games has always been something a bit far from reality.

At least here, in Brazil.

New generations have more contact with those, and it seems closer to their reality, even as something more concrete for a career.

As for us… Well, we still have to convince our families this is a real job.

“I even learned English from the games, because there were no Portuguese versions (or at least they were pretty rare).”

A bit after that, seeing it was possible to do something simple, yet fun, The Boss decided to call Lucas, another friend, and your truly to create other games.

The problem was we had many good ideas. Too good for us—if you know what I mean.

“They were very complex games, right? I mean, they were simple, like a letterwoman delivering packages in a small town.

“But in a Stardew Valley-ish style.”

We learned the hard way that simple to play ≠ simple to make.

“Since it didn’t get anywhere, I quit and went back to studying C++, C#, Java… And got bothered with that again lol.

“I realized it was not calling my attention such as games did, maybe due to this ‘number-guy profile’ I have.

“Coding games was completely different from other jobs and freelances I did.

“Those jobs were like, ‘hey, I.T. guy, I need maintenance on my page,’ and when I didn’t know what to do, did some research, found a recipe, and that was it.

“Now, coding games demands creativity.

“We start without knowing where we’re going, and that’s the thing, a bit like life itself lol.”

He told me he had to do something called “Lock on”, which I have no idea what it is. He couldn’t find anywhere how to do it specifically for the project he was working on.

But this magical-I.T.-guy-thing had to be done, so he did.

“Maybe you can find something somewhere, but it’s very likely that if you follow the recipe, you won’t get what you need, because every game is different.

“Having that in mind, as an amateur musician (violinist), I can say it, mind-free, coding games is art, man.”

I couldn’t agree more. Then we got back to working at Beta 2 Games.

“One day, The Boss called me again saying he really needed a programmer and I accepted.”

Lucas is the guy behind the Dialogue System and Localization Document I showed you last time (click here).

Since he said coding was like art, I asked him about his inspirations for the System and the Document.

“We thought about using Yarn Spinner, but we found it too complicated.

“It is good, but we found the code too complicated to make it closer to what we wanted, also, there were many tools we would never use.

“And, besides, we put in contract with the publisher we would make a localization document to help with that.”

“This way, they sent us what they used to work with. If we used Yarn Spinner, there would be a lot of work and rework, like, write here, paste there, and when you see it, there is a lot missing, and no one would know where to find it.”

Some localization studios suffer a lot from poor Localization Documents.

Sometimes the lines of every dialogue come all mixed up and from many different dialogues in the game, thus, translators have no idea what’s going on and have the worst time of their lives making the localization.

“So, the spreadsheet is very similar to the one they use in professional localization studios.

“All I did was combining it to what we thought was the best part of Yarn Spinner, plus my inspiration and experience with Visual Novels (lol).

“And it works so great that if something’s not right, there are only two possible situations:

“1) I did not pull it into the build;

“2) You messed up writing it lol.”

After a good laugh, I asked him if there were any kind of feature it could do, besides, you know, showing text on the players’ screen.

“We can change the color of the dialogue box whenever we want, shake it, change the font…

“Add scripts to it, provide in game narrative choices for players… You know, for more complex games.”

If you read the previous article, I’ll wrap up with Lucas’ explanation on the debug column, which I wasn’t able to explain to you.

First, take a look at the spreadsheet again:

“G is a language column, just like English, or Portuguese… It’s just for us to make sure when we’re playing the game, when we change the language, we are sure the language was changed.

“That is, it’s just to test the system to make sure everything is running smoothly.”

So, do you agree with Lucas that creating games is like art?

Do you use any preset dialogue system, or did you also make your own?

Let us know in the comments.

See you next time!

Pedro Porciúncula - Narrative Designer and Head of Marketing at Beta 2 Games