Gamplaye related questions - A "The Walking Dead" similar game concept

[RT-Visualization]

Hello everyone,

I’m currently developing an adventure game all by myself, that will be basically a tech-demo to show my skills, and instead of doing a CG reel I decided to use Unity 3D to make it interactive.
The game will be very similar to the recent “The Walking Dead” where the gameplay will be very basic, so the main features I’m looking for are:

-   Camera that moves along a path, according to the player position, means that while the player is walking the camera will move accordingly to the player position
-   Player controller: very standard and if I’m not wrong already shipped within Unity itself, means the player will move using WASD, but the direction of the “walking” will be relative to the camera position, so if the player is facing toward the camera to walk straight you need to press “S” ( hope I’m clear )
-   Interactive environment: means that there will be some objects that can be interactive/used within the environment, like: there’s a TV in the room, an on screen icon appear to let you know that that object is interactive, so go near the TV, press “E” to interact with it and a cutscene is played
-   QTE ( Quicktime events ): I found almost nothing about this feature, not necessarily in Playmaker, but in Unity itself, seems that on the forums no one ever attempt to do something like that….here a short description of what I have in mind
-   > Enemy try to punch the main character
>> Time slows down ( is possible to do that with Playmaker? ) and an on-screen button appear ( E for example )
>>> If the main character press E in time( lets say within 2 seconds ) the main character avoid the punch ( basically play an animation where he avoid the punch )
>>>> If the main character doesn't press E in time the main character is hit by the punch ( basically play an animation where he gets punched )
-   I was thinking about a cover mechanism: in theory I would put lots of triggers near the walls, so when the player enter into a trigger area an on screen icon will appear ( like press “E” to cover behind the wall ) and if “E” is pressed the player will play the animation and go into “cover system”….very very similar to Gears of War cover mechanic
-   About this cover mechanism, in this scenario the camera wont be along a path anymore, but will change into a classic “Third person shooter camera”, but when the player will go into “cover” the camera wont stay behind him, but stays in place, most likely Gears of War

I’m following the online course on digitaltutors about the GUI, Character animations, AI, and so on, but since I’m not a programmer at all, when it comes to customized gameplay I really need help

I saw the tutorials about Playmaker, and I must say this is a dream come true for anyone who doesn’t know how to prototype/develop something without using scripting, so I’m really curious about its full potentials

Well, the question is quite simple: based on the features that I would like to have in my game, right now is possible to develop everything using Playmaker?

Cheers

[jeanfabre]

Hi,

 I am not really sure where this Quicktime events fits in your game, so I will leave this for now.

 As far as the rest of the features, PlayMaker will allow you to experiment and build a prototype all the way to a production ready game if you want. Now, you need to be aware that building an entire very complex game with JUST PlayMaker will be a challenge if you don't master Unity and PlayMaker fully, and the likely best choice it to create few custom actions where it makes sense, on these little features that are different and unique to your gamePlay. That's were this forum comes in, we try to help everyone here by making custom actions on special case, help developers and artist to make the most out of playmaker, etc etc.

So all in all, you can't really go wrong with PlayMaker if you have no coding experience... this would actually turn out to be your only option actually But bare in mind, that PlayMaker is not a replacement of All the Knowledge you need to acquire outside coding, like physics set up, shaders, optimization of the scene, all this is still something that falls outside PlayMaker scope. Coding is just the enabler for your game to come to life, it doesn't really help you optimize it and use Unity the best possible way, that is something that all of use have to learn, experience, fail and retry over and over again.

bye,

 Jean