Alright! After a few weeks of banging out code, my adventure game engine is almost ready to fly.
There are still some features to add, and a bunch of things that need polishing, but I’ll have a better idea of how to do all of that once I put a real game together. In the meantime, here’s some video of the sample script I’ve been using to test my various tags and systems.
It may not look like much, but there’s some complex stuff going on here, and built-from-scratch as usual. Parsing the XML into memory objects, and then queuing said objects across a number of different systems is simple in concept, but in application it took some massaging. There were speed bumps. There were pot-holes. But the thing still runs.
Oh, so the bunnies. That’s a bit of abandoned fan-art for the brilliant indie-game Armello; I needed something quick to throw in so that I could build out the portrait system. The backgrounds are stock photos.
I realize that objectively this all looks like ass, but I’m blinded by paternal love for the thing. Wait ’till you see this baby with some real art behind it.
Lastly, here’s a taste of what the actual game script looks like.
I feel like I need to defend here for a second, because the tag/narrative ratio on display is a little nuts… This demo was designed to show (and test) much of the tag functionality in the most concise way. As a result, there’s a lot more tags than story here. A lot of it is redundant, since the system is built to intuit many of the tag “attributes” from previous tags.
At some point I’m going to put together a guide for this all so that other people can leverage the system for their own visual novels, or even just dialogue sequences in-game. There’s ten tags right now, a few more to come. But with these, a non-programmer should be able to control almost everything – the character portraits, backgrounds, transitions, option buttons, behind-the-scenes variables and state machine, all from the “screenplay.”
Stay tuned for more info as the project progresses.
-j
Jonny Aiello 