📝 Weekend Development Update – The Dialogue System Comes to Life!

This weekend was a big step forward for us—we finally got to see the dialogue system in action for the first time! Until now, everything was just backend logic, but now we have a fully interactive UI that lets us play through actual conversations.

🚀 From a Blank Screen to a Functional Dialogue UI

Before this weekend, there was no UI at all—just text logs and internal logic. Now, we have:
✅ A working dialogue box with animated text display.
✅ A nameplate system that dynamically updates based on who is speaking.
✅ Response choices appearing and functioning correctly for branching dialogue.

This is still very raw—no styling or real design has been done yet. Right now, Sempai is focusing on getting the core systems stable, and once everything is functional, Lily will handle the styling pass to bring in the real visual design.

🛠️ Fixing the Hardest Problems

Alongside building the UI, we tackled some tricky issues:
🔹 Response selection now works properly! Unreal’s ListView handling gave us a lot of trouble, but we cleaned up event bindings and fixed interaction issues.
🔹 No more UI softlocks or crashes. Previously, responses would disappear or break if the player clicked too quickly. That’s fixed now!
🔹 Better debugging tools. Now we can quickly run test dialogues without manually setting everything up.

🎯 What’s Next?

With the dialogue system in place, we’re moving on to character placement—getting characters on-screen dynamically during conversations. This will include:
✅ Positioning characters dynamically during dialogue events.
✅ Expressions and movement changes based on choices.
✅ A foundation for future VN-style scene direction.

At this point, our focus is shifting towards stabilizing the core mechanics so that we can start delivering playable builds with future updates.

This weekend’s progress was really satisfying—seeing everything actually appear on screen for the first time felt like a big moment! Thank you so much for your support, especially @Shorty for funding this focused sprint. We’re excited to keep refining and improving from here!

💜 More soon!

— Lily & Sempai