Conversation is somewhat of a rarity in this game; most of it takes place in desolate regions: tombs, ruins, caves, etc. Nevertheless, there are a few occasions on which it does occur.
One possible approach to this might be to have conversations take place in cutscenes. However, the graphic-novel cutscenes that I'm using in A Door to the Mists involve a fair bit of work in painting the various elements, and thus a fair bit of time and effort. Furthermore, entering a cutscene interrupts the gameplay--fine at the start or end of a level, but less desirable in the middle of one, I feel. On the other hand, they do have advantages in portraying characterisation, both on the part of the protagonist and on the parts of the other participants in the conversation. There's a certain potential richness to a cutscene that I feel could be beneficial.
Taking another direction, as it happens I already had a conversation mechanic implemented, a left-over from an earlier iteration of the project that became A Door to the Mists. This was inspired, as I recall, by the old Ultima games: Portraits are shown of the participants, with text in a large box and topics of conversation available to select to one side. However, that comes from a broader design than that of A Door to the Mists; this game's conversations are simpler, with no player-choice involved, and thus no selection of topics. And once again, having this take over the screen seems likely to me to interrupt the gameplay somewhat.
A simplified version of the above might work: just portraits and text-boxes. However, the issue of it taking over the screen remains.
What I settled on is simpler still: the gameplay continues, but speech-bubbles are overlaid on the screen, containing the lines of the conversation. (They can be advanced through rapidly by clicking the "look" button, as with the protagonist's thoughts.) The protagonist's speech-bubbles appear near the bottom, with a tail pointing straight down. The words of any other characters appear a little below the middle of the screen, with a tail pointing towards the character in question. The player can still move and interact during such a conversation, so it feels to me like less of an interruption.
There are still a few issues with the system, but it's pretty much complete, I believe!
Otherwise, a number of assorted changes were made during the week just past. Two that seem mentioning here, in brief:
First, I continued to work on lore-entries--one for the first level, and an expanded version of an entry found in the prologue, along with images for the former.
And second, I finally attended to the remaining murals in the lower tombs (something that I confess that I've been somewhat putting off ^^; ). To prevent this post from becoming over-long, I'll include just two of these below; two others should be available on my Twitter feed (at time of writing), while one more hasn't been shown.
That, then, is all for this week--stay well, and thank you for reading! ^_^