Category Archives: adventure games

Scaling actors

adventure games, gamedev, haxe, pathfinding

In a point and click adventure game there are many rooms in which the actor’s distance to the ‘camera’ is more or less the same everywhere he goes.
But there might be rooms where perspective is important. Think long hallways, large outside areas, huge room, weird camera angles, etc.
Look at the picture below. These are a few examples of area’s where the actor can move closer to and further away from the camera:

scalingexamples

When you play these games (Day of the Tentacle, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, and Monkey Island II) these areas feel very natural. How the actor scales and moves depending on the location feels just right (most of the time).

What is it that it feels natural? And how do you implement this? Continue reading Scaling actors →

Adding gameplay logic using Lua

adventure games, gamedev, haxe

Finally I had the time to finish this blog post (which I started writing quite a while back). This time it’s about adding gameplay logic to the game using Lua.
In an earlier post I explained how we separate our game code into several layers, namely the game framework, the game engine and the game(logic) itself.
Using the framework and the engine, we can build different games, since all artwork and gameplay logic is separated from these two parts. I explained earlier how the game assets (e.g. sprites) and room definitions are loaded into the engine and Jaap talked about loading the dialogue (see here), but we haven’t talked about where we define the gameplay logic, which actually makes the game the game.

Gameplay logic
So what happens when the player chooses to ‘pick up matches‘ for example? Where is that gameplay logic defined? What language is used? How is this separated from the engine? How do these parts communicate?

Continue reading Adding gameplay logic using Lua →

Interactive dialogue – part 3

adventure games, dialogue, gamedev, haxe, luxe engine

Wow this has been really some time off the game. We’ve actually run to the point of doing nothing for months, because after finishing a basic game engine – and being quite content with being able to make a prototype game to test its neat features – we’re quite daunted by the fact that we somehow have to start making lots and lots of graphics, sounds, etc and therefore have to start working on the more boring stuff of building a good tool for putting in these game assets, which should prevent pulling out hairs every time you want to test e.g. changing a parallax layer or a few altered pixels in a sprite sheet.

Anyway for the interactive dialogue, which this post is about, this tool should not be necessary, since the input format should be easy enough to edit and understand without needing a separate tool. Check out the previous two posts on this topic for some context on this.

Continue reading Interactive dialogue – part 3 →

Pathfinding in a 2D point and click adventure game – Part 2

adventure games, gamedev, haxe, luxe engine

Finally I have some time to write the follow up post on pathfinding part 1. Back then I went through the basic concepts of how to define the walkable area and the algorithms used to find the shortest path.
In this post I’ll dive in to the details, showing an example I created. Alongside this I’ll show several code snippets taken from our engine code.

The source code is available on Github and you can use it any way you want. Continue reading Pathfinding in a 2D point and click adventure game – Part 2 →

Tech stack of a point and click adventure game

adventure games, gamedev, haxe, luxe engine

In our first post we covered the requirements of our game engine and in the second post we showed its basic design.

In this post we’d like to cover the underlying technologies that tie everything together and run the whole 2d point ‘n click experience.

Programming language
We stated that one of the main criteria for our game engine is to be able to run on multiple platforms. This requirement made us have a look at what programming language would make it easier for us to support this in a convenient way and at the same time be suitable for us based on our combined experience.
The following shows a list of languages that did not make it and the reason why:

  • Platform dependent language
     We want our codebase in one language. So no language per platform (Objective-c for iOS, Jave for Android, etc)
  • HTML5
    We don’t want it to be HTML5. HTML5 might sound ideal for multi platform but it has several limitations so it’s a no go for us.
  • C / C++
    We are not completely comfortable using c or c++. Although we know what it can do and that it can support all platforms, we think there are more convenient languages that should be able to offer what we need.
  • C#
    Although C# is a great language, and using Xamarin you can target many platforms, we didn’t go for it. It’s too Microsofty.

So what did we end up using?

*drum rolls, pigs screaming*

Haxe!

Continue reading Tech stack of a point and click adventure game →

Design of a point and click adventure game engine

adventure games, gamedev

So here we are, merrily developing a 2d point and click adventure game.
That’s all great, but how do you develop such a game? What do you actually make? And where do you start designing?

In this post, we’ll go into the essential bit of designing and building a game engine.

The game engine offers the building blocks and mechanics for the game to be built with. It takes care of things such as drawing everything on the screen, making sounds, handling user input, etc. The following quote describes the concept pretty well:

“Generally though, the concept of a game engine is fairly simple: it exists to abstract the (sometime platform-dependent) details of doing common game-related tasks, like rendering, physics, and input, so that developers (artists, designers, scripters and, yes, even other programmers) can focus on the details that make their games unique.” (www.gamecareerguide.com)

So it is important to separate the code & data of the game itself as much as possible from the game engine. Since there can be a fuzzy line between the game and the game engine, we like to show you how we’ve dealt with this by starting out with a general picture of the main components that are involved.  Continue reading Design of a point and click adventure game engine →

Developing a 2d point and click adventure game

adventure games, gamedev

Welcome to our first message on groebelsloot.com!

Groebelsloot is made up of two guys: both software engineering drones by day – slaving away for our bosses – and starry-eyed wannabe game developers by night.
With this blog right here we want to share our ongoing experiences of building a classic 2d point and click adventure game, addressing technical details, story writing, puzzle design and whatever else is worth mentioning.

Why this kind of game? Growing up in the eighties and nineties we, like many of our friends, loved the classic adventure games: Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, Indiana Jones, Legend of Kyrandia, Broken Sword, etc.
For a loooong time wanted to develop such a game ourselves, but because of a string of boring non-adventure game related silly live events, we never did.

Finally the stars have aligned and we got started.

In this first post we want to go into the basic setup and approach of our 2d point and click adventure game.
In subsequent posts we want to go into much technical detail describing how we went about the realization of the various aspects of game programming. Code examples will be provided as well.

We like to think that even though the game we are building may never be finished or published at all, we want to learn something along the way and like to share and discuss it all with whoever is interested.

Alright let’s start with it then!
Continue reading Developing a 2d point and click adventure game →