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:
Our man in front of the Chiesa di San Sebastiano in Lecce, Italy.
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:
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!
On a recent play through of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge, I took notes on how many unique characters and locations there are to get an idea of just how much work goes in to creating classic adventure games.
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 caffé (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.
This time with some UI elements to make it feel a little more like I’m making progress.
This post was originally written before the 25th Anniversary Edition was released in April 2018
Simon the Sorcerer is a 1993 adventure game by Adventure Soft. You play Simon, a teenager who chases his dog through a portal and into a world is under threat from Sordid. It’s up to the rather sarcastic Simon to become a certified wizard, rescue Calypso, and save the day in a game that gleefully subverts and gently mocks many fantasy tropes.
I’ve now admitted to the insanity of building my own engine and come up with a broad idea of how I’d like it to work. The next stage is to come up with a plan for how I might go about implementing it without getting myself stuck in rabbit holes of complicated esoteric features (as I am wont to do).
For Version 1 of AdventureKit, I will focus on three broad categories: UI, Scenes, and Development: