Adventure Games

Useful Adventure Game Resources: Puzzle Documents

Since I started my series about handling movement, I’ve learned a lot more about Entity Component Systems and I’m changing the way my engine is structured to reflect this.

While this sounds like a Typical Simon Rabbit Hole, it has fundamentally changed how I approach game engine development and I have made some huge strides with very minimal effort. Thanks to the advantages of ECS, some features that I thought would have to wait for many versions down the line have become trivially easy to implement.

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Handling Movement Part 2: Scaling and Z-Positions

In part one, I set up a Movement Component that moved sprites around a space without any regard for the type of scene that they inhabit.

However, many adventure game scenes have some sort of perspective where it’s possible for players to move around an object.

Imagine a game where, say, a character in a trench coat is visiting a square in Lecce, Italy. For some reason, there’s a crate in the middle of it:

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Handling Movement Part 1: Getting from A to B

In my initial prototype I used SKActions exclusively to handle movement. It’s a fire and forget solution—I create an action with a destination point and a duration and run that action on a sprite. SpriteKit will move that sprite to the given point over the given time without me having to think about it again.

let moveAction = SKAction.moveTo(x: hasTarget, duration: length / moveSpeedInPointsPerSecond)
sprite.run(moveAction)

It’s great for many situations. However, there are a few limitations:

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AdventureKit: Development Mode

Since my last update, we have settled in Lecce, Italy for four weeks and I am back in the saddle and racing that horse as hard as I can towards the bright and glorious sunset that is AdventureKit 1.0.

Tortured metaphors aside, I have made some significant progress in the last two weeks. All of the Development tasks in my roadmap are just about complete which means I can now edit scenes directly on the iPad and have the changes appear in running scenes!

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Environment Practice: Lecce, Italy

Adventure games have a lot of environments and drawing them is not my strongest area. We’re currently in Italy so for the last few days I’ve been heading out to cafes to sit with a caffĂ© (or a vino bianco) and practice.

This piece started out as a sketch of a possible protagonist and I just shoved a side of Lecce’s centre square underneath him.

More Concept Sketches

This time with some UI elements to make it feel a little more like I’m making progress.

Building AdventureKit

Having decided that I’m building a 2D adventure game engine, it’s time to give it a name and figure out what I want out of it.

The Name

Following in the grand tradition of Apple frameworks, I’m calling it AdventureKit.

Whew. That’s enough for today, I think. Time for a beer…

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