I’m generally a n00b to game development.
Here’s a question for the more experienced devs out here: What are some tips you have for how I could go about in making a point-and-click adventure game (like the games Double Fine releases) in Defold?
Thanks everyone!
I’ve made some point-and-click adventure games before with other tools and langauges (all for fun - I love games like King’s Quest). Using Defold would make some things very easy and fast.
Using Spine would be a very good idea. Broken Age used their custom tech, but you can create similar animations and effects with it. I’ve watched some of the talks by their devs and their tools are impressive but I think they went a little overkill than was necessary. Spine is more than enough to make great characters.
Showcase Forum look at what can be done with Spine - tons of super impressive animations and styles, many which fit the adventure game aesthetic - so you know it’s possible.
You’ll need backgrounds - they could simply be flat images, or you could layer spine objects as scenes. So you could have animated grass - things that could have animations play when you click them.
For moving around / having hit detection you could use tile maps for defining areas that can be walked on. You can use collision objects to check for some events.
You can look at some of the other engines already made and optimized for making this kinds of games, and reference their features and design patterns on how to implement different things with Defold
https://www.google.com/#q=point+and+click+adventure+game+engine
It can absolutely be done. It would be more useful if you broke it down in parts and worked on figuring out how to do each. Make a basic design - like say you want to make a game like Broken Age in terms of gameplay - and figure out how to do one thing, and then go from there. Something like character dialog conversations maybe.
I’d also look at any adventure game work done with LOVE/Lua as a large amount of that work can be referenced to speed up your work with Defold, and give you good ideas on solving problems more quickly.
I appreciate your helpful response. I’ll consider Spine with the Lua runtime to integrate those character sprites with Defold.
I absolutely want to use Defold as the engine, though. I don’t want to look for another IDE.
I understand that, collision detection, physics, and character control-wise, I can program the game like a 2D platformer in Defold, with side scrolling backgrounds.
You can use collision objects to check for some events.
I’m curious about that. So if my character collides with an object in the environment, I can trigger an event? How might that work if the collided object is a usable object in the game, and the event is putting that object in the inventory? And then taking an object from the inventory, using it with something else in the environment to trigger an event typical of how an adventure game progresses?
You can use collision objects just for hit detection without doing full physics simulations.
You can have multiple collision objects on a game object. So you could detect putting an item on a character’s head or in their hands for example.
You may want to build a waypoint based path editor for scripting movement of NPCs if you want that. You may need to build a few tools like this to speed up dev instead of putting data into files manually.
If you are say taking an item from your inventory and trying to find a use for it that would be a special icon version of it and not necessarily the version that would be found in scenes. You would need to build lists of possible actions and then check them based on IDs / hashes when your player attempts to use items on stuff.