While there has been come progress on the functionality of the game, this week has been spent working on some of the cutscenes and the story of the game, to make it workable within an arcade cabinet, but also to highlight the skills I want to develop by being able to tell short, quick, stories to players that enhance their gameplay experience and make it more fun.

For these small dialogue cutscenes to work, I looked at old games that had presence on arcade cabinets and looked in particular at the pre & post-fight sequence from Street Fighter 2 where it has detailed sprites of the characters features and small amounts of dialogue text as shown below

Taking this as inspiration, I started to work on the canvas and text box to have this display when the player starts the game from the main menu, and when they complete the endgame trigger after defeating the boss. I wanted to make sure these scenes don't needlessly repeat, and as such when the game over screen will be triggered, it will bypass the intro scene.

To make the head sprites though, with time constraints in mind, I took a selfie and then started to work on it through Photoshop, thickening up my facial hair on one and then fattening up the features on another sprite before converting these to 32bit style sprites to create a final look. Adding these sprites to a similar UI box design and text as used in the main menu screen, this all came together to create a cutscene window as follows:

This worked out quite well, and better than I had expected, although the monstrosity of adjusting my face so will leave a scaring impact upon this developer. However, hopefully this will add to the unique style of the game and provide a chuckle or two to those who end up playing it.