Adventure Games with Revolution?

[James Russell]

Sorry about the rather late reply to this but was
caught up over the x-mas period. Anyway I thought I
would help answer the question about point-n-click
games like Dott and MI. I created an adventure game
engine around a year ago in Revolution. The game never
took off, the artists goals were a little too high. I
unfortunately don’t have the stack anymore but I did
learn a lot from it which I will share.

I basically had only one card for the gameplay, each
scene was stored in a separate field of another card.
I would basically set the background image, set the
points of an invisible graphic and set the rects of
any specific invisible buttons (for hot spots) needed
and their label. This information was all gathered
from a field, to make a new scene I would simply set
it all out (change the image,graphic,buttons) manually
then click on a save button I made (which wouldn’t be
accessible  to players) that asked which field to
store the data in and created that new field and
stored the gathered information.

What did the invisible graphic do (by saying graphic I
refer to the line/polygon tools use in rev). It
allowed me to set up a 'rail' so to speak that the
animated ‘actor’ could move along. So when the user
clicked on a hotspot (or even just on an empty area) I
took the x position of the mouse click and made the
actor (which was really a button with icon changes)
walk along this graphic, I checked the next point
closest to the actor and moved the actor to each
subsequent point, until his x position matched that of
the mouse click. This didn’t work for open areas (that
scripting was changed to invisible buttons used as
walls, when collision was detected the actor would
stop) but worked amazingly for all other areas, a mock
up I did was the first few scenes in Monkey Island and
it worked like a charm. Especially after added in
depth code (Where the actor’s y position was
constantly checked and his images resized accordingly
to give the illusion of depth), so if any fans of
Monkey island are around I pulled off that walk up the
mountain to the blind guy quite nicely :D

As for the hot spots, once the actor moved within a
hotspot its label was checked and depending on what it
was an action happened. I believe I had keywords
separated by commas like "teleport,Forest1,20x50"
which the game would parse as change scene to Forest1
and set the location of actor to 20,50. or Ignore that
simply disregarded that hotspot.

I hope this helps you as you can see its quite simple
coding wise, the drama begins with the graphics ;)

Jeremy.


		
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