Very specific rocks and rats

So the weekend is here and I get to have time to work on my game. My wife is off with friends and family and the football season has finished, so hardly anything to distract me. This week's been a busy week, but I did make progress in the quest system.

I already had some gathering quest mechanics. Now I also have movement quests. Furthermore I added a way to start and finish a quest. The only way to do that was to talk to an NPC. Now moving to a designated location can also trigger the quest.

Finally, I implemented something to have completing a quest make other quests available. While this is not finished yet, I could be used to guide bigger story lines. For instance, an NPC might send you on a quest to go somewhere and that location will trigger a gathering quest or another move quest. It still requires some work to finish it, but it's starting to work a bit and, like the enemy AI, to me it kind of feels alive already, which is a good thing. I do need others to share that feeling, because such things are deceptive.

Another thing: a gathering quest is now about gathering a specific object. That's fine when I need to fetch the Special Unique Sword of So-and-So, but when I need to gather a flower or a rock, I should not need to get that one unique one. A flower is a flower, so what I'll add is that a gather objective can either point to some specific object, or one of more objects with certain characteristics, like a tag or some information about the object.

Same will be with killing objectives that i'll add later. I can be asked to kill a very specific knight or a monster or something, but it can also be that we need to get rid of a rat. Rats are not unique, unless we're talking a special one. Once I have my combat system, I'll make sure that killing a generic enemy like a rat or a guard will trigger something else than killing a special character, like that one knight,

Also, There's the matter of marking where to go for a quest. Especially now that a quest could turn another quest from unavailable to available, there needs to be some sort of recognizable thing to tell the player a certain NPC might have a quest or a certain location might. For that, I'll probably use some marker near the quest giving object like an exclamation mark or some particle effect that I never worked with.

In the next week, I'm going to work on the GUI again. I would like to have my GUI for journal entries, inventory and quests first (in no particular order). Furthermore, I would like to refactor some stuff in my worldobject class. That'll make it more flexible and easily implemented, especially for the inventory. Here I also want to prevent the GUI to show "Flower", "Flower",  "Flower", "Flower" and "Flower" when I actually just have 5 flowers. An object is unique or it isn't. If it isn't, We shouldn't spend too much space on showing them.

This'll be useful for things like arrows too. I don't want the player object to keep track of 2000 individual arrow objects. I just need the game to understand this particular object is an arrow so that it will be stored as an amount so that the game might pull arrows from a pool. But that's for later.

Been a while

Alright, quickly before I hit the sack. It's been a while since my last post. Life interfered like it sometimes does. Went away for a weekend with my wife to celebrate we got married a year ago, so that was nice. The neighbours and some famous tv-show both took an evening and then time goes fast, but I'm back, I guess.

What I've been working on and have not finished yet is a system of quests being triggered by a collider. Once the player moves into a trigger area, it should evaluate if that trigger completes a moving quest and then check if it offers a new quest.

Of course this does not work yet, because it seems I have trouble triggering a dialog screen to notify the player the first quest's been completed, AND somehow the new quest starts off "completed". Not sure what that is about, but I'll find that out later this week.

Now off to bed. Tomorrow gamedev time, because I refuse to watch Eurovision and having a lady in the house, that's what is happening here..

Video: So Far So Good

I did not have too much time to work on my game, so I thought It'd be nice to show some game footage of me playing whatever it is that I do have. I know it's not perfect and you'll see a couple of bugs, but it's starting to get interesting, if I can say so myself. 

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Sorry about the video quality. I'll try to fix that later. There's a little letter pinned to the wall that I can read. It's all placeholder graphics made in Piskel to have anything to serve as a letter. It'll be replaced once I make the graphics or have someone else do that. not sure yet, so I'll focus on the mechanics, GUI and the like.

Looking at letters user the same mechanics as picking up things, opening doors and talking to NPC's. There's an interact script to do things with objects, depending on what kind of object it is. Is it an interactable, like a letter, examine it, is it an NPC, talk to it, etcetera.

Well, if it's a door, open or close it. Behind the door, there's the blue Friendly Guy that wants a red ball from me, and a red Unfriendly Guy that wants to walk towards me in a buggy fashion. Talking to the Friendly Guy reveals a quest that he has. This one is easy to complete, so I do that and return the ball. Turns out out friend does not have enough stuff on him to reward me. Usually, I'd be angry, but he, this is a public video, so I'll let him go.

I might have more time tomorrow and Wednesday. Hopefully I'll be able to complete the quest for movement quests too. There are - for now - three kinds of quests (or rather objective types; a quest can have a number of different objectives to complete): Gathering quests, movement quests, and defeat quests.

The defeat quest will have to wait before I have combat mechanics, which is not my first priority right now. That'll be movement objectives. Movement objectives are mainly meant as helper objectives to get the player to a place to have him receive further instructions. it should be quite easy to implement. That's what I'll do next.

Furthermore, I plan to make GUI for inventory, journal and quests. Later there'll be trading, equipment and player stats screens. There will probably not be based around the dialog window that I use for examining and dialoging.

Multipurpose mechanics

The quest system really starts to look like something. A quest can be accepted or rejected and if you don't answer and return later, the NPC wil phrase the question differently. Quests have objectives that can be gathering of an object, defeating an enemy or moving somewhere. Gathering now works. When you get asked for a red ball and you get one, the NPC will understand your success and ask for the thing:

I'm pretty happy with that, because I think I built a dialog system in the progress. Not only are quests starting to be implemented, I also nog have some GUI and mechanics to run a dialog window with one or two buttons to work with. It's always nice to be able to reuse the stuff you build for seemingly unrelated purposes. With hardly any changes, the player can now read a letter on the wall.

Of course I know the letter is not easily readable, so I'll make the panel less transparent and lighter of color, but it pleases me that it works so nicely. Pretty proud of myself.

Before I get ahead of myself. That's it for now.

A quest in its own right

So I'm implementing quests in my game and since I had been quiet for a while, I'll start with a cheap joke: that's a quest in its own right. It looks like it's taking shape, but it's all looks now.

The first thing I needed to do is have the game understand there's such a thing as a quest, which is now actually nothing more than a class with a couple of strings to contain text. Most of the text is for  dialogs, so I created a dialog handler that can show whatever you want to show in a dedicated dialog window when the rest of the GUI is hidden.

Quests are connected to WorldObjects via a script so that when you interact with that object, it'll view the dialog box. That's kind of all I did tonight. What I'm going to do next is make this a real exchange. There's a couple of lines the NPC can speak, depending on the status of the quest, but that status will never change. For that, I need to have the player actually get the quest. Getting it will change the status. 

Next, I want to add mechanics to the quest so that it has objectives. A delivery quest, like this one, needs to have information on what the NPC wants to have delivered. In this case, the red ball. Furthermore, finding the red ball should change the status of the objective so that when I return to the NPC, it'll be able to decide what to say. A lot of stuff.

And... I need to get the NPC to respect me enough to stop patrolling when we're talking and maybe other NPC's to wait for the dialog to complete before doing their things.