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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Illustration of a white shed in front of a dry stone wall and surrounded by olive trees, based on the Honesty Bar at Masseria il Frantoio
An illustration of a piazza in Lecce, Italy, with a man in trench coat standing next to a box with a rabbit poking out of it. He is saying 'Are...are you seeing this?'

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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An illustration of the Chiesa di San Sebastiano church in Lecce, with our man in a trenchcoat in front of it and a suspicious stranger seated smoking a cigarette.
An illustration of two men, one in a trench coat and one in a purple suit, standing in an alley with a garage door in the background. The bottom sixth of the screen is highlighted red to illustrate where the man in the trench coat can move. This red space is marked 'Movement Space'.
An example scene with the movement area highlighted

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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Illustration of an alley off of Piazza Castromediano Sigismondo in Lecce, Italy. There's a cartoon man in a trench coat off to the left in front of a café.
A screenshot of my adventure game scene. Textastic is open over it and the scene file is being edited. The non-player character's position is being changed.
Updating the purple character's position

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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An illustration of a character with a goatee and a trench coat standing in an Italian square

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 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.

A black and white sketch of a man outside a garage checking out an air hose to use on his flat tire.

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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