Interfaces, Inspiration, Intrigue, and Intent.

Hello everybody. My past few weeks have been swamped mostly by midterm after midterm after project after midterm at school and getting ready for beta testing our application at work. I've also been gaining an interest in the game Go, but I am of no actual skill just yet. Even with all of the work laid on top of me, I've made some pretty significant steps in the Adventure Core.

This section has nothing to do with the Adventure Core

Before I get to that, I want to talk about some personal motivation/inspiration that has come to me in several forms recently. I have an ever increasing realization that game design/programming is what I want to do with my life. Not only do I want to do it, I'm discovering that I am getting pretty decent at it. Normally, every person that I show a personal project of mine (whether it be a program, song, or other random work I have done) responds with as little enthusiasm as it takes to not make me feel bad. This current undertaking of mine is a radical exception. Everyone I've demonstrated it to is extremely impressed with my work so far and is excited to see how it progresses. I really am starting to be confident in my work (for once) and will hopefully continue to increase my skills to create manageable, larger-scaled games.

I recently purchased the Mega Man X Collection on Gamecube, and it got me thinking back to my Mega Man obsession I once had as a kid. Mega Man 2 was the first game I had played that made me look into how games are made. I was hooked on the game and was fascinated by every little element of it: the open-ended level selection, the excellent music throughout, the creative enemy/level designs, etc.

Anyhow, this continued into thinking of what games have kept me interested in games. Why is it that I am sticking with games, even though I'm dissapointed by so many every year? Immediately, the first game that popped in my head was "Tribes". I've been a Tribes junkie since early 1999 and have yet to play a multplayer game with such perfection ever since. There have been a frenzy of rumors on Tribalwar the past couple of days about a Tech Demo GG is showing off at GDC that is very Tribes inspired. I can honestly say that I was more excited about this rumor than I have been about most games in the past few years. Other games that have kept me interested in games and have kept me interested in game design are Fallout, System Shock 2, SimCity 2000, TIE Fighter, pretty much every Lucasarts adventure game, and a few other classics.

Where am I going with this? I know that there are some absolutely amazing game designs out there that still stand up to their excellence today. Behind those amazing game designs are amazing game designers. If anyone has heard Will Wright give a lecture on game design, he knows exactly what is going on in his games on every single level imaginable. I have been studying the art of game design on a personal level for a few years now. I've begun to take some notes on some ideas I have for what could be my next project once Issue 37 is complete. If anyone wants to talk to me about my current idea or about game design in general, go ahead and email me at nevogames *at* gmail.com.

This section is about the Adventure Core.

So anyhow, my recent updates. The largest and most noticable update is the brand new GUI to help with level creation. Heavily relying on Justin Dujardin's Tab Book gui control, the interface is clean, informative, and powerful! There still is a lot of tweaking/functionality/features/aesthetics to finish, but it's looking nice in its current state. Bringing up the menu will display this screen:


The currently loaded level will automatically populate the related data on the GUI. This initial menu is used for tweaking general properties about the level. Nothing too fancy, but if you notice the "New Level" and "Save World" buttons, those are functioning. "New Level" will allow you to quickly generate the .map file based off of a template and setting your own background/foreground via a menu. It's enough to get your characters set up, then can be tweaked with all of the layers already placed down using the tile editor. "Save World" will save all of the loaded levels. characters, items and completed goals into one file for easy file structuring.

Saving the levels are cool I guess, but how do I manage game content? How can I keep everything in context with the story?



This is a fun one. It took a little messing around with, but once again Action Sequences save the day! As you can (sort of) see in this picture, there will be a list of goals on the left side of the gui. The developer can then select a goal and set what actually happens when a goal is completed. The next time the level is loaded, any goals that have been completed since the player last visited the location will be updated according to the settings made in this (and the next) menu. If you would want to just write a function in script to handle the call instead of (or additionally to) the Action Sequence editor, you can just specify the name of the function. Otherwise, you can use this...



...and make that line-by-line uninteresting script really, really easy to write. Each tab has a similar button layout to the one shown in the image, but that mindless but necessary instructional code can be made quickly, even allowing specific edits if at all necessary. This normally painful to write code will be the bulk of the game content work, but hopefully the ActionSequence editor will make it a lot less painful.

There are at least 1-2 major hurdles and about 30-50 lesser hurdles to jump before I can consider the Adventure Core near completion. Finals are coming up in a few weeks, so I don't know how much time I'll have to dedicate. I'll still be plugging away at it, but my pace probably won't be as fast as I would like.

Happy pre-emptive President's Day!
/Jared