Calling out to all Adventure Game/RPG torquers...

#1 Have you taken a look at MyDreamRPG.com ? They have an RPG Starter kit add on to TGE with a demo. I haven't had time to look at the demo so I am not sure how well it works.

And to answer your question, I am interested in an adventure/rpg game starter kit.

#2 Yeah, ive seen that... it looks really interesting. i wasnt able to download the demo though. the link was not working about a week ago... im going to try again though.

the only thing with that is that its for MMORPG's... although im sure it can easily be addapted.

#3 I'm currently making an adventure game with TGE, although I would consider it more in the traditional definition of an "adventure game" - i.e., text-based adventure games. The product page is here, if you're interested, and I have a few blogs about it too.

The term "adventure game" seems to mean a lot of different things these days, though, so I'm not sure if that's what you had in mind.

There is also someone doing this sort of thing for TGB, IIRC.

#4 My project is a combination adventure/rpg, but it is in TGB not TGE. The main reason was simplicity. But I do not see why TGE couldn't be used for an adventure game.

For example, take the feature demo and look at the camera pathing (otherwise implement the Advanced Camera resource and combine cameras, triggers, and paths for a more dynamic and camera-oriented feel depending on the adventure-track you're taking. Next, take the inventory and conversation resources and tailor them to your game (for most traditional adventure games, the conversation resource is a bit weighty). If you're looking at a Zelda-esque action/adventure title, you'll want to implement pathed interiors and either the melee resources from here or MyDreamRPG. It really depends on what you're attempting. If you go even more "old-school" in a 3D medium as Rubes is doing, then you'll have to radically rethink how you're going to work within the medium. His blogs are extremely illuminating in that aspect!

As Rubes notes, the idea of adventure games has expanded significantly in the last fifteen years. From interactive fiction to Sierra and Lucasarts to Zelda to Resident Evil and Beyond Good and Evil, Eternal Darkness, Longest Journey, Sleeping Dragon, etc. There are a lot of splinters that genrephiles revere and resent.

Mine is closer to a combination of Kirby, GTA 1/2, Silhouette Mirage, Paper Mario, Brave Fencer Musashi, Moon, and Club Pogo than it is a "true" adventure title. I just don't know where to put the "genre" so the widely divergent action/adventure/rpg "genre" kind of fits best in its hybrid form.

What type of adventure game are you trying to make?

#5 Jared Coliadis is the guy I was thinking of...he's doing an "Adventure Core" for TGB which looks really slick. His initial blog is here, I recommend checking it out although it's for TGB, not TGE.

@David: Thanks...I haven't heard much about your RPG Tutorial lately...or did I miss something? Oh, and you're right, the text parser code makes me want to hit somebody with my keyboard.

#6 Nope. Didn't miss anything. It's still in existance, but is on hiatus until the show I'm in is up in July. The end of the semester kicked me in the head a bit as well. But I've been prototyping in the minutes between school, reading, work, and rehearsal. I've taken a lot of what I've learned from protoyping this project and putting it into a practical and concise format for a from-scratch tutorial. The scope of the tutorial has been pulled back significantly. It never was as huge as the one presented on TDN which included a number of different mapping styles and such.

Since I'm trying to create a from-scratch tutorial for RPG's, I'm also looking at how to create high-quality art to use as example art. I've been writing up layered rendering documentation for Blender and Vue for the environments (at least I was before the end of the semester and the play I'm in came crashing down on me). While high-quality art is not necessary for prototyping, it seems to be something that beginners often get stuck on. The "I want my game to look like Final Fantasy before typing a line of code" mentality. So I'm trying to create a concise guide to creating quality artwork for the RPG style (combination of FFVII pre-rendered backgrounds with lighting and shadow layers ala the fish demo). And the system is extremely simplified now. I had a lot of ideas on things to do, but they would have ultimately been quite confusing for a beginner, which is my target audience. So I have simplified it down to a system not-so-different from Ultima III's. There are now two levels since the level loading scheme is the same no matter how many levels there are and the point is not to make a full RPG demo but to make a high-quality tutorial from scratch.

Unfortunately, with the show I'm in and the summer hours, I doubt I will get back to it until July except in piece-meal. Same with the full project that I'm working on. It was prototyping this one that really kick-started me into figuring out how best to present the RPG tutorial, though. Especially since I've been using a lot of different software in the last several months. I decided on Blender not because it was my favorite choice but because it is freely available for beginners. Same with GiMP. I predominantly use Modo, Lightwave, and Vue, with Photoshop CS2, Painter, Final Cut Pro, Motion, and Shake. Most of which beginning developers wouldn't want to pay for. So I've re-evaluated my tutorial artflow to be beginner friendly. Which also means that it has been kicking me in the head more than it was before!

I'm hoping to work on it through July and post it on TDN sometime in August. Oops. I guess I'm really trying to avoid work with that wall of text!

#7 @David...

Geez!!! thats one hell of a mix!

@All
Anyway, your right, anything can be turned into anything if we have the the programmers to do it! ;) but the point is that if it was a good idea to have a starter kit and if it would catch on.

The adventure game genre is very broad, but the idea. is basically the same... story controlled events, dialogue in game, no loading of "levels", dynamic inventory system... etc. you get the idea.

#8 Yeah. It's hard to explain since I have cherry-picked things that I liked from my prototyping and noted games that have similar elements. Combined, it's not really anything like those, but it is interesting. Not quite as interesting as the horror-play-novel-puzzle-prototype I was playing with before the RPG tutorial. But it was basically a play-novel Myst-like with puzzles as event solvers. Then I realized that I didn't like to play Mystlikes and I really didn't like prototyping them, either. I did salvage some of the puzzle mechanics, though, and am using them (not that I have time to work right now).

I'm not so sure about the "no loading of levels" as traditional adventure games consisted of loading "rooms" or "areas", which translated to action-adventure titles like Resident Evil's rooms and "loading doors" and streaming video during transitions in Myst-likes or mission areas in games like Echo Night and Cthulhu: Dark Shadows of the Earth. The seemlessness of Myst seemed pretty good unless your CDR burped and the transition video stuttered.

I think that creating a consistent and managable drop-in inventory, dialogue/narrative triggers, and a cinematic system would go a long way to helping people create adventure games and RPG's. Narrative and conversation triggers aren't that difficult in their base form, but conversation nodes and event management can turn into a nightmare if people start wanting "massive branching conversations!"

There is a good thread about creating a RPG starter kit from a long while back. I was skeptical about the idea simply because of how the RPG genre has spread and shifted into a wide-variety of genres and the expectations among developers who would purchase the pack would be all across the board. Of course, now, years later, I'm writing a RPG tutorial. But it's for a very specific type and style, and because of its style, it would be easy to pick up before or after the other beginner tutorials. Trying to approach a number of different points in the RPG genre has the potential to be confusing to someone who has the idea of what they want in their head and finds tutorials that touch the edges of the idea but don't tell them how to make what's in their head. I'm not even trying to do that. Instead, I'm making a very specific tutorial for a specific type of RPG that has features that other styles would benefit from (simple inventory, shop, and conversation scheme).

#9 All these ideas sound great. I'd be interested in reading the tutorials. :)