I was thinking about how I wanted to go about the beginning, however I was having some trouble. I made a game for Ludum Dare 29 and I had each screen/level be it's own class. It wasn't bad, but it was pretty bad. My problem was that I didn't really know how to have different events and such occurring in each screen
without having each screen have its own class to keep track of stuff. I still don't really know, but I thought of a guy I watch livestream a bunch, and thought maybe I could write a small "scripting"? (don't know if that's the right word) system in order to keep track of objectives that need to be complete and such, without having to have classes for each Screen.
I don't know if it was a good idea, but it ended up working and I'm pretty happy, and it didn't take too long to get it working basically. Even if it wasn't the best way to do it, I still learned quite a bit. This is how it works:
1. I have an Interactable class and a text file named "Interact.txt". My Interact file contains a list of Interactable names. Tabbed in under each item name are some instructions, ended with the word 'end'. What I have so far looks like this:
Print does what it says, it prints it to the console. I also have it working so that it prints to a line of text above the player's head. complete(ship) means that the objective should be marked complete in the ship Task. Each Task has a name and a list of interactables that need to be interacted with before it is complete. The task file looks like this:
toilet, ship_plants, and ship_food are all interactables. As they are interacted with, they are marked off as true. Each one needs to be true for the task to be completed. Finally, I have a basic if statement built in. if done(ship) means that if the ship task is completed, then the player prints "Time to sleep" and otherwise it prints "I'm not tired yet". This ensures that the player visits each item before going back to bed.
Next, when I create my tile map I have a new layer called Interact, and I put rectangle objects in there, and give them names based off of the names in the Interact file. For example, I put a box around the toilet, and gave it a name toilet. In code, the map loader recognizes that, finds the script associated with the name toilet in the file, and sets it up.
Then the task manager loads all the tasks (right now it is just ship) and sets each interactable as a thing that needs to be completed.
While this is pretty cool (to me) it's not useful yet. I can't really do anything. What I would like to do is be able to continue the story from the script. The player is going to be kidnapped by aliens, however I would like to be able to trigger that through the script. I think I could do this by having a Scene class, and then I can have a command setscene(scene) or something like that that would change the scene, loads whatever map, etc. I could keep the scenes in a text file too, in a similar way.
Here's a gif, I'm having trouble putting it in my post: http://i.imgur.com/OYdyhI1.gifv
