When I first started, I'd always planned to present dialog/narration to the player using comic-book style speech bubbles. I had a lot of this working (ported from an older incarnation of the game), but when I stepped back and looked at it, the honest truth was that it looks cool in a screenshot, but is totally unplayable (hard to read and confusing) in a game itself. It also suggests to the player that the game should still be playable while dialog is on-screen (as there might just be a small, one-word dialog off in one corner of the screen that barely grabs your attention), and it feels really awkward when the whole input system is locked out waiting for you to acknowledge the dialog. I've backed off for a more subtitle kind of approach that isn't as cool, but should be a lot easier to read and clearer as far as "your game is frozen until we go through this dialog".
While I was playing with it, I also scratched a long standing itch to see what things might look like with a toon shader. Still trying to work out whether I really like it, but it does remind me of the old monochromatic spectrum isometric games which is makes me all warm and fuzzy. I still need to sort out some way to monochromatically layer a detail texture over this and see how that changes things, but in the mean time, I'm very interested in any opinions on the look one way or the other.
Cheers!
