Hey there, friends! Welcome back on board of “San Francisco”, a huge spacecraft travelling far, far way from planet Earth.
First let us get back to our last week’s quiz and the quote written on a note above Oddy’s bed. This surely is a verse from a poem by Robert A. Heinlein, an American sci-fi writer, written for his short story "The Green Hills of Earth". However this title has an even richer story behind it. Check it out on Wikipedia!
And the winner today is GreyAlex! Congratulations! We will email you the key shortly.
After wrapping up character design I started working on the first-playable and on the game engine. There were a lot of serious preparations at this point. A lot of time was spent on designing and thinking the entire system through. I knew that the success of the entire development will depend on the core engine, so my efforts and time would pay off eventually.
A quest includes dozens of locations and hundreds of items. And there is always the temptation to implement this system directly in the code. Let’s say, we have four chests in a scene. Sure, you can write a couple of lines using C# or Java to easily handle the situation and walk players through the game story. And there is another location where you must help players picks two items in a row. You can add another line of code. Sounds easy, isn't it? Not at all! In time the total difficulty of these conditions grows and can become overwhelming. Can you imagine what kind of construct grows in the code as you approach the first hundred items?!
I’ve chosen a different approach. The entire game logic for items is handled by a separate script. The core engine recognizes it and applies the conditions and commands to the items in scenes. If there is a command “make the character use this” – all right, let’s do this,
I can change the name of action in the script at any time to make it look like this:
No need for recompilation or reassembly. Four lines of script handle the four chests. No complexity growth whatsoever! The basic stable game engine does not change, no matter how many objects or interactions are added. You can be sure that the 1000th line will work just the same the 10th. There is no need to copy any strings and the required line can easily be found using the search function. And yes, I am aware of the frameworks available on the market… but none of these offered the required flexibility and some key features that I will focus on some other time.
I should also say a few words about the mini games architecture. There is different logic in different games, so we had no other choice but to write more code. But!
Due to the features of the global engine structure, all mini games featured in all of the game episodes are absolutely isolated from the main engine. So even if something goes wrong in a mini game that won’t affect the main logic. This also has the benefit of non-strict discipline when coding the mini games. You can just work at your own pace and enjoy coding.
Next time we would like to talk about the episode structure of the game or continue our tale about the project development. But now it’s time for another quiz with a prize key for the winner! The pilot episode (which is currently available on Steam via “Demo” button BTW) features a separate part called “20 Minutes on an empty stomach” – a parody of some other game. Can you guess this game?