iDevBlogADay

I am pleased to announce that I will be participating in the iDevBlogADay. I will be posting every Sunday to keep my spot on the iDevBlogADay.com list. Stay tuned, maybe I can get in the habit of posting more regularly.

The Awesome Adventure System

Lately, I have been rethinking my adventure game idea. I have come to the conclusion that I will build an adventure game system. I am calling it the AAS (Awesome Adventure System). Recently I ran across a text adventure engine written in Javascript (link) and while checking that out I thought to myself… “Self, wouldn’t it be cool if I could create a simple XML definition for a more visually oriented adventure game?”

Tiled The Editor

I have chosen to use Tiled (link) to be the game creation tool for the AAS. For those of you who use Cocos2d, you may be familiar with Tiled already. For everyone else, Tiled is a very nice 2-D tile map editor. Tiled can create special object layers and these object layers can contain any number of objects, all with their own properties. Tiled also exports an XML file and its TMX format is supported by Cocos2d.

Progress

The AAS games will be downloaded as zip files. This zip file will include all needed game assets. Each game will start with a default.tmx file that will load the initial map and the main character. It will also initialize other global setting for an AAS game. Each map can have any number of exits that will link to other .tmx maps. When you step on an exit it will unload the current .tmx map and all its assets and load the next one. The engine so far can download, extract, and load a game. You can walk around loading and unloading maps as well. The player moves with a point and click (tap). I have an A* pathfinding algorithm that will walk the player from one point to the next. Each object in the world will be a finite state machine to simplify the creation of actions available.

Scope

Some of you are probably thinking that this is a pretty large project and will probably end up going nowhere. I am not trying to create an engine that will be able to emulate one of the Kings Quest games. I am talking about short adventures that will take 1-2 hours to complete. The stories can be broken up into chapters so new chapters will be released on a semi regular basis. This is a project I have been wanting to do for years. Once it’s done it will allow me to focus on art again for awhile. I would also like to allow others who are interested to make games for the AAS.

The Art

I am an indie dev and do all my game work in my spare time around a wife and 3 kids. Something needed to be done to get this looking cool while still giving me the chance to code. I decided to ask the great and mighty pixel artist, Jalonso (Gallery) if he would lend a hand. I am very happy to say he has accepted and will be helping out in his spare time. Thanks Jal!

Conclusion

The AAS is going to be my sole focus for iPhone dev for quite a while. I am more excited about this project than any other that has come before it. Please feel free to give me ideas, suggestions, or criticisms via the comments.