Month: December 2015

Every year we play a presents game with Christmas. The game goes like this:

• Throw a dice.
• The rolled dice number means a specific action should be made, like pickup a present, open present etc.
• The second round will make the actions more diverse, like ‘trade the present with your neighbor’.

But as you will all have experienced one way or the other, the dices get lost. There is some cheating etc.. So the game I created is a “wheel of fortune” kinda game. All the actions are represented as slices of the wheel.. It’s better to show you a vid of the resulting game I guess.

Almost every adventure and every RPG has some kind of dialog system. The best known example of this is Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis.

The dialog at the end where they are at the heart of Atlantis must have been a nightmare to make. There are so many paths indiana could follow through,with only one path leading to a survival. Thinking about how to make such a system, I thought i’d had a look what’s available on the web. Not much at first, so I almost thought about making my own crummy system. But eventually I found and chose something, although it’s a Windows application.

It’s always good to think about what’s available to you in the framework. Twine gives us json and every can be tied together with javascript.
I looked at Twine a free online creator of those dialog trees (http://twinery.org). It has Windows, OSX and Linux. So that’s very nice and it’s free.
Javascript support is there on ios, but the API is not nice because it assumes you are making iOS UI kind of stuff. I think this is a bummer.

On Ray Wenderlich I found some RPG samples that used Lua, that gave me some head start how to make such a dialog system. But because I am a one man coding army, I thought I needed a graphical way of creating those dialogs and testing those apartly from the game (testing takes about 60% of your alotted dev time!). Writing dialog is also a creative process and If you don’t have a tool to write the dialogs it will become cumbersome to do.

Eventually I found Chatmapper , a commercial dialog editor (http://www.chatmapper.com). I was surprised it used Lua for scripting. This all seemed to fit nicely with the samples I saw on Wenderlich. So I gave it a go. It has very good support for various format, json, xml etc.. What is nice is that it also imports a project from xml, so If any transformation needed to be done on anything on the project file, it could be imported and will work just fine. It is very stable and mature and oh it’s used on the most recent  Leasure Suit Larry game. So it will be capable of more than my needs.

I was not very happy how the elevator looked in my game. I wanted it to have a more alumium look.

 

What’s in a name? It’s the most common name around in english speaking countries besides John (cannot back this up with any claims).

But who’s is Dave? And what is the motivation behind this name? Well it typically is a name that is given to a (anti)hero.  Lets list some of them  :

• Dave Bowman is the hero in 2001: A Space Odyssey
• Dave Lister is the only surviving human in Red Dwarf
• David Banner, the name of the TV Hulk
• The name of the impersonating President of the movie ‘Dave’

The Dave in this adventure is a smart guy, but as many fellows of his age, he is searching for a goal in his life. He dropped out of college for no particular reason and got into trouble when Kangs henchman found him. Kang wants him to do something dangerous. BTW : Kang will be the next character I will introduce.

 

Every given Sunday I plan to make a nice screenshot showing off some of the artwork of the game. This will mostly not be a final shot of the game, but it will give an impression how it will look. (So it will not spoil any of the plot of the game).

Well isn’t this a typical lab room? Dave, don’t try to do much silly stuff in this room!

Lucky there is a fire-extuingisher and a medical case!

Time to show some of the latest developments for my Adventure game the Lost Adventures

 

Room to Room from franzzle on Vimeo.

The video shows some of the Rooms that can be visited by Dave in Kangs enormous complex.
The rooms are the dining room and the kitchen. The kitchen shows a character that plays a little role in making a meal for Dave. Maybe you can guess what kind of meal this will be for our hero Dave? Will he found a way out of this mess? And will that the scenario he had in mind for himself?