Anyone working on a point and click adventure?

[harrywatson]

Anyone working on a point and click adventure game? I'd be keen to share thoughts code etc..

 

Here is my favorite developer in this genre http://www.psionic3d.co.uk/

 

As an artist the graphics are no problem for me. The code however is another story.

I'm starting out without a library in order to more thoroughly learn the code function behind it all.

 

Currently looking at mouse event handlers on the canvas element.

 

I can get canvas coordinates and get a hit test on an element but I don't have the experience

yet to animate an object to a specific location on click - namely an inventory.

 

The first code I wrote myself is a scene changer.  It might help another newbie out there.

 

http://harrywatson.altervista.org/momo/index.html

 

Any insights, comments, would be appreciated

 

 

[enpu]

I would recommend you to use game engine:

http://html5gameengine.com/

[harrywatson]

I've been putting it off. I'll browse some createJS tutorials. Thank you

[alteredMethod]

I created a PaC game just using jquery and html/css.... But I am trying out phaser.io to see what it can do. Maybe we can collab at some point?

 

Here is the game I created a while back: http://www.kolbaba.com/experiments/sas/

 

I'll check back soon.

 

-Jordan

[harrywatson]

Hey Jordan that's beautiful just the sort of 'artistic' approach I really like.

Samsara room is another lovely game here it is if you haven't seen it.

 

http://notdoppler.com/samsararoom.php

 

Here is a kid's book I thought I was going to write before getting html5 obsessed.

 

http://scribbly.altervista.org/book2/index.html

 

I was wondering at one stage whether the code would be useful for making a point and click game

on one page. Loading the html for each scene. That was before I learned about the canvas element.

 

Yes I'd be keen to keep in touch. Yours is the sort of gameplay approach I really like - atmosphere etc.

Great stuff.

 

Harry

[1-800-STAR-WARS]

I'm a massive fan of the old Lucasarts/Adventuresoft/Revolution point and clicks, and I've been thinking about writing a Phaser plugin to provide helpers for making similar games. What kind of features would be useful do you reckon?

• Some kind of level editor - tilemaps won't cut it but needs 2d backgrounds with freeform collision data/preset paths and items/characters
• Pathfinding
• Inventory/verb system
• Dialog system (subtitles?)
• Save/load
• Some kind of world progression trigger, eg Monkey Island when you do x action y person appears in town etc

[harrywatson]

All the above @Lewis paticularly an inventory.

Progression trigger sounds great

 

Maybe a system where you find say; all the parts of a robot. Once your robot is assembled

an event / animation is fired. One of my favourites. I did this in game salad.

But alas I've made things difficult for myself and left all that behind me.

 

Ah yes I know. When you've found something (clicked on hidden object etc..) it could trigger

a number of events, sound, animation etc. Rather than just 'you found a key' Yawn, yawn.

 

Sounds a great idea. We need more lateral thinking in these point clickers. Thanks @Lewis

[zargap]

I did something sorta like this pretty simply in just jQuery with good ol' CSS. It's at dreamnavigator.info, it's pretty simple and it could probably be made even moreso.

[harrywatson]

Nice @zargap really cool - relaxed looking artwork. I love that stuff.

I try to teach people to relax about art. To love to 'do it' not just the

result. I instigated an art process at work

http://www.kingstreetartworks.co.nz/

  whereby we roll out a huge lot

of paper (wallpaper will do) and put out containers of paint and brushes sometimes.

Then we splash paint around; in the process getting rid of that horrid internal editor. 

The rules around it are manifold as you can imagine.

I call it a 'splashy' workshop. Great for kids but not so good for 

the corporate visitor walking by in his tailored suit. Especially if

you use exterior enamel house paint.

 

Joking aside it's actually quite difficult not to gravitate towards patterns.

Very interesting if you are trying to be spontaneous on a regular basis.

It doesn't actually work and spontaneity then actually becomes a discipline.

It's fun to choose bits of the result - cut them into shapes - scan them into

gimp or photoshop and basically get that nasty editor of her/his couch and working

to make your 'splashy' into a kick ass graphic. opps I do go on a bit.

 

Thanks @zargap

[harrywatson]

A day with Createjs.

 

I thought this might be of interest to anyone looking for a framework.

I made this in one day! I was tempted to work on it a lot more before

posting - but. I thought it might be more informative to leave it as,

one days work by a newbie.

 

This is the first day I looked at Createjs.

 

An hours video tutorial at five in the morning and then tweening cupcakes by 10pm before bed.

 

This is the first time I've ever tweened anything. It's the first time I've got preloading to work

and the first time I've been able juggle around with event listeners with such gay abandon.

Sounds are a bit patchy across browsers - pretty much my first go at that too.

 

Hope this helps someone.    

 

http://harrywatson.altervista.org/momo/index2.html

 

http://www.createjs.com/#!/CreateJS

[Crusader12]

I built a little something just for this. You just need to know basic HTML

 

http://codecanyon.net/item/jaguar-adventure-game-engine/8753130

[gizmmo]

This is awesome, I really feel like the game world needs more of these types of games.  Point and clicks are great, though myself I tend to gravitate more towards the adventure side in the style of the wolf among us.  I am myself right now making a development environment that extends Phaser, but I was using createJS beforehand.  CreateJS is terrific too and I built a canvas app out of it before, I just went towards Phaser because of performance and the game state manager.  Keep up the awesome work! 

[harrywatson]

Hi I'll be working on point and click code. Adventure and or escape.

 

Inventory, combination locks, the whole lot.

 

When it's done I'll post it for those who are interested.

 

I'll use createjs at this stage.

 

At some point I plan to look into phaser.

 

At the moment though, I'll use what I know.

[spinnerbox]

So what happened, did somebody make PaC plugins for Phaser?

 

I would try myself, its just that it takes time to design and develop such tools.

 

Anybody made a game with Jaguar Engine?

[programicks]

Hi. I am working on an html5 point and click game at the moment. Since hotspot areas to click on can be all kinds of shapes, I use 'getImageData' on a png with different colour areas for each hotspot which is drawn first before the main view is drawn. I use photoshop to show the main image and can then easily draw the different colour shapes on a new layer over the image to see where the hotspots go.

Ok, there is 'isPointInPath' but I find it easier to do the above than code the drawing of the canvas shape.

I don't know if there are game engines that will allow you to draw in odd shape click hotspots but you may prefer to use the game engine. It's just, I started doing my coding by hand and got used to it this way. In fact, I would argue that coding by hand is just as fast. Get postions using mouse x and y then type figures in the js. When you load your game in the browsers, you know what you see is what you get.

 

Mike.

[harrywatson]

Sounds great, when can we see an example? I'd be interested to see, even a scene change.

Hotspots have never been a problem for me. Either using Createjs or native code.

I suck at maths but I have a calculator. And I code co-ords into every game I make 

to place everything. Just mouse over it and write it down.

 

Keep smiling Harry

[jasonb]

 

I'm a massive fan of the old Lucasarts/Adventuresoft/Revolution point and clicks, and I've been thinking about writing a Phaser plugin to provide helpers for making similar games. What kind of features would be useful do you reckon?

• Some kind of level editor - tilemaps won't cut it but needs 2d backgrounds with freeform collision data/preset paths and items/characters
• Pathfinding
• Inventory/verb system
• Dialog system (subtitles?)
• Save/load
• Some kind of world progression trigger, eg Monkey Island when you do x action y person appears in town etc

 

Please make a Maniac Mansion style plugin for Phaser!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Please do

[spinnerbox]

@programics Check the examples for phaser http://phaser.io/examples/v2/input/pixel-perfect-click-detection

 

http://phaser.io/examples/v2/category/input

 

I would also recommend trying the Jaguar engine. 20$ if you make a free to play P&C game.

 

I might try it though.

 

Somebody spend years in developing it, so why should you bother reinventing the wheel

[salcapolupo]

...btw, I gave a chance to Jaguar for a while, but I am not very satisfied: very simple concept and cool approach, of course, but too much examples and advanced stuff difficult to manipolate and/or understand. And demo files not working in my browser, that was the worst...

 

If Phaser could include some concrete support i.e with plugin or live example for developing point & click adventure games, would be great for all I suppose.

[spinnerbox]

Phaser is excellent, but I am switching to Unity3D. If you stay with web/browser Phaser will do a great job but porting pure JavaScript to mobile still does not work well. Apache Corova suffers on performance and Crosswalk adds 20MB to the installation, unless you make the user install Crosswalk run-time separately. 

So Unity3D is best option except maybe Adobe Air

 

P&C adventures are not hard to make I guess, if of course somebody can make you the graphical part or it. You will need large if/else block or you could use binary decision tree to cover all cases when a player interacts with a scene object. Again P&C are more graphically/sound heavy than performance intensive. 

The story is more important and the graphical/audio experience it gives.

 

Yes you will also need an inventory, maybe there is some UI prebuilt element in Phaser that will do the job.

 

As for path finding, you could finish the job by telling the player character move from this (x1, y1) point to this point (x2, y2). Simple as that. You could spend some time learning what this does https://qiao.github.io/PathFinding.js/visual/  or this: http://www.briangrinstead.com/blog/astar-search-algorithm-in-javascript

 

Hope this helps.

[rhmoller]

Ron Gilbert who practically created the genre is working on a new point and click adventure. He writes a lot about the process and even posts code snippets.

http://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/

[rhmoller]

Ron Gilbert who practically created the genre is working on a new point and click adventure. He writes a lot about the process and even posts code snippets on the development blog.

http://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/

[Traceur93]

Maybe you can use an engine like Gamesalad or gamemaker. It's perfect to point&click game! And there's no code to write.

 

 

 

Federico

 

http://jesterapp.blogspot.it/

[brendaespadas]

Anyone still interested  on building a plugin for phaser or another free js engine for PaC games.? I think this kind of games really deserves  a plugin or proper engine for html5 as it has its own particular needs and mechanics. Extending phaser will be my first guess, but I didnt try others. Woukd you like to start a dev team?

[stamas47]

One I am finished with my current game, I'd love to contribute. Huge fan of games like: Fate of atlantis, Monkey Island 1,2,3, The dig, Syberia, Runaway series, Broken sword series. I'd take the  Ron Gilber style approach.