It started with a trip to Singapore.
This was a natural deadline to get AdventureKit to 1.0.
It was going so well. In the last week, I had added my first animated walk cycle and even included some reach animations for my main character.
AdventureKit
Order of Operations in Components
I have a trigger component that can cause things to happen in my games as a response to other events. Each trigger has various properties (animation, sound, movement) that the trigger component uses to update other components.
Managing State in Adventure Games
One of the things that I got stuck on last year while developing AdventureKit was tracking state. After coming back to it again this year I realise I was coming at it from the wrong direction.
AdventureKit Image Naming Conventions
I’m going to be generating a lot of images over the coming months and I’ll be using many different apps to generate them.
So far, for my example adventure game, I’ve used Procreate, Adobe Comp, and Affinity Designer on the iPad and Photoshop on the Mac. I’ve also developed an asset management app on the Mac that I use to create the animation JSON data for my engine and that moves the assets into the asset catalog within the game bundle
Developing a Jigsaw Puzzle Game Part 1: Planning
I was recently playing The Black Mirror and one of the earlier challenges is a jigsaw puzzle where you have to reconstruct a torn up photograph.
The player clicks on a piece to activate it, then they can move it around using the mouse or right-click on it to rotate it to one of four preset rotations. They click again to release it. When a piece has the correct rotation and is near the correct position, it snaps into place, which works as visual feedback that it has been placed correctly.
It was an enjoyable break from the exploring and it got me thinking about how I might add it as an optional mini-game type in my adventure game engine.
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!
AdventureKit Roadmap
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:
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…