Sunday 26 May 2013

Student Project V: Adventure Tool Kit - Introduction, progress and more

It is the fifth semester and my last at the Games Academy and this time around I have not found enough other students to work on my idea (a point & click adventure in Unity) and the other projects were not what I wanted to do in my last semester. Apart from group projects we can also do solo projects in which we have a tutor who will supervise the challenge we set for ourselves.
So I really wanted to develop my own point & click adventure and now I am doing that alone. Unfortunately, without much outside help I am not capable to get my ideas in a game, so I decided to build a tool kit with which I might be able to make my ideas reality later on. The first part of the Adventure Tool Kit (ATK) is a dialogue editor with nodes for every line in the conversation.
My work started about three weeks ago and my first working prototype is ready:
Complex dialogue with multiple "hubs", I used the first dialogue of "Magic of Innocence" as an example node network.
Even though it might look ready yet, there are a lot of kinks I have to iron out before calling it "finished". As you can see in the screen shot complex networks with hubs can get kind of confusing to follow so far. There are some features missing that might be important but for that I have to meet with my tutor and show him the process and get his feedback.
The next part will be an item editor and after that I will implement a control system for mouse and touch interaction. The end goal will be a small game prototype were I used my tool kit for content creation.
If the tool kit works as I want it to I might even considering selling it on the Unity Asset Store. If I will provide it as a whole package or a set of components, is not clear yet.
Some artists I worked with have said that they might provide me with some art assets that I can use for my prototype, so it might not end up as crappy as I thought ;P