Game in a Day 21 - Adventure Game

This weekend I got the Synapse Gaming GID team together again to participate in GID 21. This was our first GID in a year and our first official GID in over two years.

We generally go with the proposed themes, but decided this time around to skip a theme altogether and focus exclusively on game mechanics. We chose an adventure style game both because we love the genre and because it's something we hadn't worked on before.





The project came down to two key elements; the conversation system and the quest system, and a ton of filler like asset creation/location, level building, quest creation, dialog writing, skill system, .... you get the idea.

The main requirements for both the conversation and quest systems were that they had to be flexible enough to handle conditional and structured conversations/quests (dependent on player's skills, items, previous conversations/skills, ...), inter-operate with each other and the player's skill system (to provide and be dependent on skill points), and be flexible enough to run and track many complex conversation threads and quests. The idea being that these two systems with only minor changes should be able to handle a complete game, not just a few simple conversations.




(the original conversation dialog looked better, but didn't get added to the repo)


Nearly all of the game's assets were reused from TGE 1.5, Constructor, and previous GIDs. Other than the base village and a sign post (which marks the warp/zone change areas), level work only came down to mission creation/editing.





We kept the project tightly focused on game mechanics, so there are no nifty graphics to show this time around other than the interior ceiling fadeout, which was necessary for the top-down/semi-isometric style.

Unfortunately we were only able to participate 16 out of the 24 hours due to the entire team sleeping in on Sunday, which was Father's Day. However the GID was still a success as we managed to meet all of our projects goals, it's just a shame we didn't have time to add more than two quests and a handful of conversations into the game.

It's likely we'll pursue this projects further. We came up with a solid adventure framework that's just begging to be finished.

Adventure Game Video


SG Team GID Recap:

GI10H - Paintball
GID-14 - Ghosts
GID-13 - Fusion
Unofficial GID - Random Prototyping


-John Kabus
Synapse Gaming
Bleeding Edge Indie