Scripted Scenes in Dead End

Since I recently finished updating this system, I thought I’d give an explanation of it for you 🙂

Dead End uses a system I made years ago (and first used in Planet of the Poison Past), which allows me to quickly write dialogue, scene direction, and a few other neat little game related things like inventory addition/removal and setting story flags.

It is based off my (very limited) experience with Ren’Py (which was wonderful) to make Important Game You Should Play. I loved how you could quickly create character settings, and then use a shortcut to refer to characters by a single letter. So that’s what I used as the foundation for my system.

OK, so lets go through the script for the above scene! It is just a text file, which the parser will read from top to bottom, processing one line at a time:

First we use the ‘char’ command to create our ‘Enid’ character, and pass along all the information we need;

• shortcut (from here on, ‘e’ will refer to our Enid character)
• display name (for dialogue bubbles with a name display, I’ve recently disabled them tho – just trying it out!)
• animation object name (name of the gameObject which has Enid’s animations on it)
• tail point object (which object a speech bubble’s tail should point at when Enid talks)

Here we specify where and how Enid’s speech bubble will appear on the screen. Position, scale, colour. Not much to it but just these go a long way to distinguishing between different characters’ speech.

We also set up Enid’s motion, this includes:

• How fast a character walks
• The name of the walking animation
• How fast a character runs
• The name of the running animation
• The idle animation
• How fast a character turns

Although not used in this scene, I can give direction in these scripts to direct characters to move about, and this stuff determines how they do that.

We do all this for each character in a scene, so here’s that for the other character, the Aristocrat:

Once our characters are set up, I specify which animations they should be playing at the start of the scene:

(These animations will stay the same throughout this particular scene, mostly because I haven’t animated much else yet, but once I have I’ll be able to say things like “e anim shocked” or “a anim rudelaugh” to have much more expression. But I’m waiting till my writing is more certain first, so I don’t make animations that I later decide not to use).

The next thing I usually do is check for item use. If the player tried to use an item and triggered this scene, we can check what item it was and go to a specific marker in our script. Here, if the player tries to use the crest then the parser will look for the “usecrest” marker, if the player tries to use any other item it will go to the “usemiscitem” marker.

And here is the scene’s dialogue for the gif above. I use the character shortcuts (e for Enid, a for Aristocrat) and quickly write out dialogue and scene direction.

This saves a HUGE amount of time compared to any other way of writing scenes I know of, and I can make little changes without any worry because it is just a text file (no compile time!)

Finally, the ‘end’ command tells the parser to complete the scene and not to keep advancing to any more lines beyond.

But there are lines beyond! This is an adventure game after all and we did write some conditions for item use, so next we have the markers that those conditions point to:

We have markers “usemiscitem” and “usecrest” marked with #, the dialogue for each kind of item use, and an ‘end’ to finish the scene.

The ‘usecrest’ section doesn’t need an ‘end’ however, because that really is the end of the script and the parser will know to end there 🙂

~

The scene parser also understands commands for dialogue choices, showing/hiding props, music cues, transitions to other levels, camera direction, character motion like “walkto” and “runto”, setting story flags (Boolean, float, int, string, vector), going to a specified line marker, going to a random marker from a list, and a command to trigger C# scripted actions for anything that the parser can’t do.

This is one of those kinds of things that takes a LONG time to program, but once it’s done you can work A LOT faster.

Like, A LOOOOOOOOT.

~

I hope this was interesting, and in case it’s useful for you I’m attaching my current parser script. It won’t do much without all of my other adventure game systems to work alongside it, but it should at least provide some insight into how I write a parser that can do all of this 🙂

As always, thanks for your support! It means bunches to me, bunches and bunches. SO MANY BUNCHES ok I gotta stop typing now BYEEEEEEEE <3

Mega Star Ball

So… let’s get this out of the way right now; this game is not good.

It is incredibly simple and there isn’t much too it, but honestly it’s also feels like kind of a miracle that I was able to make anything this month at all. So I’m sharing it with you; this basic trashy wonderful crappy miracle <3

Honestly this month sucked for me, nothing especially bad happened but it’s just that part of my process involves… coping with my brain. Sometimes it’s running at a million miles an hour and I can get SO MUCH done in a really short space of time, other times I am banging my head on my desk for weeks trying to make myself write a handful of lines of code… this month was one like that. I’ll probably write a more in-depth post another time about my process and how it fits in with… well… the way I exist? I guess? But I don’t have the energy for that now (sorry!)

Also I’ll try to have the monthly WIP build ready for tomorrow, but if not then there will be two next month 🙂

Anyway you can download the game below, or play a (slightly laggy – don’t know why yet) web version > here on itch.io < (with password: “megastarball”)

Monthly Build 2018/04 – sxo4857q

Anyone want some anti-gravity racing?

The features for this one are listed on the game’s itch.io page, but as always I made a video talking through the game just for you, so you don’t have to do anything annoying like reading… apart from doing it right now. Wow you’re still reading. Reading is for nerds.

Nerd.

Anyway I hope you like this one, sorry it ended up appearing so late in the month but it’s yours now <3

Download windows/mac/linux versions below, or grab them on itch.io through your patreon account.

Sinput

 Hey, this month I’ve been working on a new input wrapper for unity that;

• makes common gamepads work out-of-the-box
• supports rebinding in-game
• has slot-based player input filtering
• is not complicated to use
• is free

It’s not 100% where I want it yet, but is largely functional (I’m gonna start using it in my own projects from here on) and I wanted a version ready for Global Accessibility Awareness Day so here it is.

You can download the asset package below, and watch my (very hectic) explanation video of it here.

Update(23/05/2018): New version is out, and I’ve made an itch.io page for Sinput. You can download this version below but I’m probably gonna forget to keep this page updated, so check the itch.io page to get the latest version in future.

Ducksnaker PRO

Ducksnaker PRO is a tool I have been working on for some time now, and I am confident it is now ready for release.

DSPro has more features and is more stable than any other ducksnake editing tool, it features full undo (and redo), copy (and paste) support, as well as advanced features like: zoom, marquee select, eraser.

It even has the revolutionary “Autosnaker” tool, allowing for rapid iteration of ducksnake design.

For now I have set a nice low RRP on it, and ducksnaking professionals will be able to buy it for just $2,999.95.

But as thanks for your support, patrons can get it free by following this link.

Edit: For a full demonstration, check out this video.