Happy New Year and Story Time

Happy New Year!

Hoping you had a good Christmas. For me it was a great opportunity to actually write the story of my game. Or at least the first few pages of it. The more I wrote the easier it seemed to flow onto the page.

Now of course my game isn’t a novel so I need to make my game support my story. Right now my game is just a set of features that don’t really mean anything (combat, gathering, skills, quests etc). I mean it could work well as an open-world RPG with an opened ended goal, kinda like No Man’s Sky was at first but even that had a basic story.

So I needed a structure to support the story. So I have a Story object which has child objects of StorySteps and these have StoryStepSequence children (to support fades to black/white/up/down. I then need to make the game actually check and update the story appropriate and make it support all the types of StoryStep.

So first up I started with an conversation with NPC (Danyan Fishman) who is the first person you meet. This is mandatory conversation the player has when they first appear in the the game. So it’s basically a cutscene where you click through each line of dialog.

So the cutscene step only handles talking to one NPC right now so it’s just you and whoever the you’re talking to exchanging words as you can see above.

Next up is the tutorial story step:

As you can see it a picture of a quest with it’s details then below is a dialog box of what the tutorial is trying to explain. Later I will add little highlighted parts of the picture to explain what various things mean in more detail. For now though it’s a picture with a dialog of explanation of the tutorial.

And finally.. the Story Line Quest step type. Which looks like this:

This is basically the same as being offered a quest when you click on a NPC with a quest available except in this case the decline button is removed so the player is forced to accept it. Also they are locked in place. This is essential really because without this there IS no story.

All this “glue” is really what makes the game hang together.

Inevitably I also fiddled around with some filtering and tweaking the post-processing shaders so it should look even smooth and nicer.

Also since I had some extra free time I can time to finally refactor (so exciting I know) and tidy thing up a bit.

Until next time…