First up, here’s a list of what’s been done this week.
+ Added NPC’s to the game engine & a data structure to support them
+ Added basic NPC interaction
+ Added NPC rewards
– Slight overhaul of the player movement logic
As you can see, this week my primary focus has been on NPC’s. Whilst I’m moving on to other sub-systems next week, you’ll be hearing/seeing more about NPC’s in the future. For now, I just wanted to share some of the basics with you.
My current NPC interaction is very basic. As you progress through a level/puzzle you will see NPC’s who can be approached (providing you can create a path to them). Successfully occupying the same tile as an NPC tile will result in one of three conditions (or a combination thereof). The first is the initialisation/progression of a quest fragment (more on that in a future post), the second is a conversation, and the third is a reward.
Currently a conversation is one sided with a simple text dialogue giving you some information or progressing the story – the story is very much told through the levels themselves so this is used as an accompaniment to that.
Rewards generally take the form of a number of tiles. Sometimes these are core tiles, sometimes special tiles. I’ll share more about the reward system in a future post :)
Unfortunately there’s not much to see visually on the NPC front. Its all rather ugly because I’ve spent all of my time ensuring its functional and no time on the aesthetics (NPC appearance, text appearance, reward popups etc). As a result, this weeks image is a photograph of a board game that has been a huge source of inspiration for my current game.
Next week I’m switching back to the level editor to focus on the authoring side of my NPC system. I’m also hoping to create the graphics for two more of the core tile types.
See you next time.