I am working on a project called Night Sky.
Being unsure since we are supposed to hold the game page hidden, if actually can share any information about the project at all. So i removed a clip i uploaded and some early background story text.
It's always interesting when people use their own self-created engines rather than one of the big established ones, and this looks pretty innovative and exciting. Anything to make it easier for the player to interact with the game is a positive development. I'm looking forward to seeing the end result.
XD That's the story of all of us creating our own system. No matter the result, for sure the joy was there just creating them.
One thing I i thik i learned doing mine, is that trying to stick to an existing program language instead of creating your own from scratch is easyer for you to create and easyer for others to learn.
I have seen your "pastebin" and i can get the concept of external .txt files for each room, isn't it? Do we have a public definition for that ConTextEngine or just private? I'm just curious about systems :)
using a existing language would mean a larger interperter to a larger degree i would say, I am not after making an entire programing language after all.
There is not public defenition since I am not done defining it for my self.
I just added the idea of enter, exit blocks. where I can place script that should run when I load a new room, exit script is run for the old room, enter is run for the new, mean i could trigger the effects like a look action on the room i am entering automatically from any room, rather then being dependant on showing the right text from the action in the room previous room that I just left.
But quick break down.
The engine builds around a few basic ideas.
1. each row contain it's own full Script logic.
2. a tab means the current script is a child to the previous script.
3. before execute each script do a Eval() to determine if its the children should be executed.
4. when a script is executed, all its children will be executed in order if the Eval pass.
5. Each time you load a scene the old scene is released, and the new one, with a new input context is created.
Action(Free text, each word is converted to a context with the previous word as a parent, when your input match the action text and you press enter, all childscripts are executed)
"look boots", "open top cabinet"
Command (defined system commands like present, set, load, inc/dec, system)
* present combines text and when to show it to the user.
* load the scene from the specified folder by parsing the Logic.txt within. "command load Living/CentralCorridor"
* set will set the namedstate type to the value "command set (bool)MyBoolStateName true"
* inc/dec increase or decrease a int state by 1 "command inc (int)MyIntStateName"
* system( back to book menu, exit, debug)
Condition(compare state to value, or state to state)
* will only Eval to true if condtion is true, and only execute childscripts if thats the case.
Automatic Enter/Exit
* Exit will execute before you load the next scene if a exit is declare in the script.
* Enter will execute after a load if the newly loaded scene have it declared in the script.
using a existing language would mean a larger interperter to a larger degree i would say, I am not after making an entire programing language after all.
Oh, it was just an idea that works for me :) During development I had to take many decissions, some of which I would not make now, but i'm happy with the choice I took about stay stick to an existing languaje. ParserCommander that I developed has about 3.000 lines of code, so it's not very large I think.
There is not public defenition since I am not done defining it for my self.
The same works for me. I started to make external documentation about how to use it, and finally I realize that it would take almost more time to do and maintain it than programming it :D
It's nice to make parsers, but also games, so here we are! ;)
Yeah. I am putting a lot of energy into that working. Right now you can't "tab" to autocomplete a word, but I am considering adding that before release. I also considered a way to step between the suggestions.
The idea if I can deliver upon it, we will see further on, is to have more details in the scene you need to notice to solve puzzles by turning dials or fill in some values, information that is accessible trough looking at things in the scene.
There would still be a few use A on B things as well.
But the most important part for me, was to have noone guess words in a given context.
I am not 100% percent sure my self yet.
Except that you are at a research base in the arctics.
I was considering 5 days where you end each day by sleeping, and where you get a ending depending on some of the choices you have done.
But we will see how much I manage to get in to game before the deadline.
Trying to track down a new bugg I am having, and also doing some design decisions in regard of the actual scripting itself.
Changing a few bools to a item keeping a int state to make it possible to know exactly what state the object is in without having to check multiple values
Also I am going to properly push all code to github, I have forgotten about that, and it would be a damn shame to loose all the code up to this point.
Be careful about that. I suppose it is not considered a "public release of the game" if you upload only the code to a public GIT, but ask organization before!
All that things sound exciting and itriguing. I will for sure check also the code if available some time @.@
Git allows a free amount of private repositories these days, so only people invited would have access at this point.
This is more to allow me to be able to back changes or test thing in a different branch and return to the previous state if things doesnt work out as intended. So its in no way a public release. :)
Cool!
At work we use TFS for Visual Studio projects, and sometimes paying Git Lab things.
Many, many time ago I tried GitHub but it only was free for public projects (or at least I didn't found other way), so it doesn't fit for me at that moment and I didn't return there again.
That's a very good idea and professional approach ^.^
Things are seldom this easy, I had to rewrite a central part handling how i process my scripts, now the validation was done each time a scene was loaded, and each time you tried to execute the command. So it had a 1 in 100 chance to be added to begin with, then 1 in 100 chance to execute if it was added.
Now validation is just done on scene reload, and that is done as soon as any state is changed in the scene. Essentially any action you do.
Yeah I know its to late to change. And I won't I just feelt like it might have been a better decission early on.
I just have no idea how to complete this on time at the moment.
I have added so theoretical endings but not sure how the player should get there since they would need so much logic and choices to end up in those situations. I tried to stay away from a "fixed path" mentality and more that you are a bit more free to do things, but it effects overall states and descriptions.
I think I might have spent to much time on micro actions, where I should add time on major actions, as in,
instead of doing things like "enter data", "review entry" "validate and send", it could simply be the action "work" with textbased feedback.
I know I should not "cry" over this, it's my firstly full designed more complex text adventure, and I don't think any game designer delivered gold on day one.
I also look forward to converting part of this system to a graphical system onwards. You got some config settings, and based on those it can parse space quest esq games or early limted computer point and click, where you have a room view but no clear character like Deja Vu and Shadowgate.
