PureBasic Forum

I've been giving some thought on how & what to name my game engine.

Up till now I've just referred to it as the "Morriana Engine", after the fictional world I created when I started writing a book many years ago, partly because I've been considering using the book as the basis for a game world itself, and either completing the Book and then doing a tie-in with the game, or just using the game as a means to act out and finish the story that I started telling with the book itself.

But that doesn't really reflect the nature of the game engine itself, or what its intended purpose is. It is my intention that the engine can be re-purposed for all kinds of different worlds/stories due to the nature of it being inspired by MUD engines. Obviously changing the "content" can be done with any game engine, but I ultimately want an engine where you can change and add/remove features just like a MUD server.. So you could change the combat mechanics to use (or include) guns and other complex ballistics versus swords.. Remove the magic component of combat mechanics and replace it with a "Technology" type component..

But as everyone knows all the cool names are acronyms and that is what I am trying to shoot for. I've only come up with one that really works though:

TIGER Engine - Text based Interactive Game Engine for Roleplaying

Anyone have any better ideas that sound cooler & describe what the game engine will do?

You would be giving Phil some direct "name" competition with his CAT: Creative Adventure Toolkit which was an awesome text game creator

I think I played with that years ago when investigating avenues to try and make an actual text game, but found it hard to grasp.

Or maybe that was TADs... hmmm I dunno.


Eventually I'd like to make something with graphics though... too bad I suck at them! Can't even learn pixel art

I'd love to do a Space Trade/Combat RPG next, or Isometric style Tactical RPG (i.e Front Mission / FF Tactics etc ) but I'm just not sure I could make it play well with Text, even using some rudimentary 2D stuff
Definitely couldn't afford an artist either.

I will be happy to get this project ever finished though... would be nice if I had a game I could release as donate-ware or something.

Codename::ZachEngine

Think about a better name when it is done. Until then dont waste
your brain power for finding a name for something that does not
exist yet.

Does anyone have any thoughts on a Quest / General Game State system?

I've struggled to come up with an approach to designing such a system, and I've actually wasted a good hour trying in my head while at work this morning.

It's one thing to attach a simple script/action to an object in the game.. i.e Flip switch / light comes on.

But a quest system is escaping me.

I want to be able to have some freedom with it as well. i.e Multi-part quests (Sometimes a quest only needs 1 goal, sometimes it needs many spread across various interactions). Also, any quest specific dialogue that is not normal dialogue, any special events that need to be triggered.. etc More importantly I am hoping to be able to manage the creation of quests within my build tools, maybe stored in a custom XML file, allowing players to potentially extend the game with their own story-lines.

It would be stupid and wasteful to attach fields to structures for everything in the game, to keep track of that - so I don't want to make that mistake.

I guess I am at a loss about how to distill the functionality and interaction involved in tracking Quests, down to a basic level of switches I can cohesively manage.

Hmmm Toms put forth ideas for a Quest system 2 pages back..

This thread is getting too big

I have been doing some thinking about how I might want to do combat in my games lately, and I've had several fresh ideas pop into my head.. In the end I may have to build basic prototypes to get an actual feel for how they would turn out, and actually play on screen, but here is one of them..

Up until now I had always thought of my combat system as being real-time, round based combat against actively roaming mobs.. Basically like it is done in MUDs (online Multi-User Dungeons), where the user roams the world and encounters A.I controlled mobs ("mobiles" basically a combat only version of an NPC), the player or the mob could attack first, and combat is done in "real-time" with no pauses to select your actions, etc.. The only time influence being Round Time, a concept that limits the time between attacks or other actions. So you swing your sword but then you realize you need to drink a health potion, but you may have to wait 5 seconds after swinging your sword before you can do anything else... So basically that was the kind of system I was aiming for initially.

But I have been playing Tales of Phantasia lately, a console RPG (one of my favorite types of RPGs to play) for the SNES and I was wondering if there isn't anything I could do to explore the possibility of combining several aspects of different types of RPG's into one unique system..

I like the idea of party based combat, and although I would like combat to be real-time, or at least semi-realtime, I could settle for something less than 100% real-time as well, or some kind of hybrid mix.. Anyway I thought of several possibilities..

1) The player could simply walk around and explore, with a randomized variable initiating a random encounter after X amount of steps, or X time has passed. This opens the way for turn/party-based combat, while still leaving the 1v1 system a possibility.. But fighting a group of orcs sounds like more fun, right?

So you "enter" a random battle, maybe the screen clears and then redrawn in "pages" during the fight, or maybe it just scrolls the whole time.. But if I did clear & redraw the screen in "pages" that would leave room for a more user-friendly combat system, which could be composed of text menus with a numbered interface, letting you select what you want to do, etc. It would let me display a lot of information at once in an organized manner as well, without overwhelming the user with scrolling text whizzing by, and relieve the burden of having to remember and/or type specific commands/abilities and such.

Or could possibly use such a system without the random encounters as well, and simply have an engagement system where you have to "engage" or approach the enemy that is in the room... Or the battle could be triggered automatically by the enemy if it decides to attack first after seeing the player/party..

I have several variations of these systems floating around in my head, and I think I might end up hacking out some quick "proof of concept" demos or something, to see if people feel that they can actually play a game using one of these designs..

Have you been working on this lately? I like the idea of prototyping the different combat mechanisms (leads to lots of good ideas) but I know that prototyping too many different versions can be a hassle.

I'm not a big RPG player but... in terms of how combat is initiated, I associate random encounters (ie. after 'x' steps) with minor 'dumb' like animals or creatures or Pokemon or whatever... NPCs that actively pursue you I associate with 'intelligent' enemies or humans... and NPCs that you can see and actively avoid are somewhere in between (like some old RPG maker games I've played). I guess 1v1 or group battles could fit any of those? Same with turn-based vs. real-time vs. hybrid battle? Hmmmm...... any new thoughts?

I have been trying to work on it.. I made some very minor code modifications to my Room Editing code to move that along, but the truth is I have become stuck on some philosophical / technical design problems related to hard-coding certain things vs the level code reusability I wish to achieve..

It's stopped everything because I can't think of a way to satisfy the problem that solves the issue, is of a level of technical skill I possess, and personally satisfies me
I feel really painted into a corner on this, and it is very difficult for me to solve because some of this relates to my personal character quirks and what motivates/de-motivates me to do things..

I have decided to post a new thread (was surprised to see a new post in this one that wasn't mine) explaining the problem in more detail and seeking advice..