The Festival - Developer Log 17, 02/25/2026
February blows, doesn’t it?
Hey folks, I’m back with the second developer log of the new year. While I’ve only recently been getting back to working on the project itself in Unreal, I’ve been quite busy behind the scenes. The biggest update I have to share is that I have been collaborating with two new teammates – Grace and Ashley! Grace is handling the game’s UI/UX considerations, with a heavy focus on the dialogue UI and accessibility concerns. Ashley, meanwhile, is providing Unreal programming assistance, and was introduced to me by my friend Morgan Taylor, who previously contributed 3D environment help in late 2024.
I will be making new “Meet the Team” posts dedicated to the two of them in the near future. For today, I’d like to talk about the game’s dialogue UI.
The dialogue UI I've been using up to this point has been very sloppy, but it got the job done. I was using a modified version of the ‘CRPG’ widget that came packaged with the DialogueTree plugin. I was using two royalty-free images as backgrounds, and I was using this font by Beary.dsgn on Fontspace. For the longest time, I wanted the game’s UI aesthetics to be based around pen and paper – dialogue would look handwritten, while browsing the game’s info menu (for objectives, mission details, and characters) would have you browse pages in a notebook (like in Pentiment or Life is Strange).
I would still like to build the game’s UI around these skeuomorphic designs, but I’m prioritizing legibility and ease-of-navigation over aesthetic choices for the time being. Enter @in-case-of-grace – she previously provided some vital feedback to me when I showed off a very early build of The Festival, especially on accessibility features. After reviewing her work, I asked if I could commission her to handle UI/UX considerations, to which she agreed. After some deliberation, a contract was signed, and she’s been iterating on blockouts since roughly the start of February.
She’s made a handful of prototype blockouts, but after some further discussion, we decided to try replicating Disco Elysium’s scrolling dialogue panel. Below are a couple different examples of what Grace has come up with so far:
And here is my attempt to incorporate it into the game from the past couple days:
It’s very rough. For now, I’ve gone back to basics – no fancy font or royalty-free images acting as backgrounds.
I was working on this the past few nights, and got programming help from Ashley last Sunday afternoon. I am still using a modified version of the basic CRPG dialogue widget from the DialogueTree plugin. To make a long story short, I made a copy of what I was using before, broke it apart to understand how it functioned, and then did my best to rebuild it and reformat it to match what you see above.
Overall, I think it addresses a lot of my major concerns with legibility while presenting a very unique framing for the dialogue. It also means I won’t have to make full-body sprites for each of the characters; I can get away with just having their portraits as icons (to be added at a later time).
I was initially reluctant to make a Disco-style dialogue UI window, because I did not want to rip off Disco Elysium wholeheartedly. Grace, being a TTRPG dev, assured me that I had no reason to worry, as many TTRPG devs are very chill about others incorporating their work into their own ideas*. To that end, I was willing to give it a shot, and this is the direction I’d like to keep heading in for the time being. We still have a lot of prototyping to do, but I’m very excited to see this new UI taking shape.
*(also, the original ZA/UM team members were very open about where they lifted their creative decisions from, so this adoption is in keeping with their ethos as well)
Lastly, while I was using royalty-free assets for placeholders, I plan on commissioning custom UI art for The Festival. I am currently figuring out how best to move forward with this, and I hope to update you all on it in the near future.
I’ll mention more about Ashley’s role in her introduction post. I will follow up with her and Grace’s “Meet the Team” posts as the next updates.
Hope you are all staying warm this brutal winter.
