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Author Topic: How to create a "Choose Your Own Adventure" story game?  (Read 7851 times)

Morphski

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How to create a "Choose Your Own Adventure" story game?
« on: January 02, 2014, 09:25:26 AM »
Hi,

I'm looking for any advice or links to tutorials that cover creating a choose your own adventure style of game using Playmaker in Unity3D.

Basically a passage of text, a choice of options for the player to select from by clicking on, which then leads to a new passage of text differing according to that option.

 I'm not an artist so the amount of art would be limited which is why I hesitate to call it a visual novel.

I'm not an experienced programmer but in my mind I see the way to creating this with unity3d and playmaker to be creating the text as an art asset and the choices as buttons?  How could I track choices? Or implement random encounters?

Or am I going the wrong route and shouldn't be doing this with playmaker? And should look at Ren'Py or something. I'd quite like to make it in Unity because of its export options though.

Thanks

jeanfabre

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Re: How to create a "Choose Your Own Adventure" story game?
« Reply #1 on: January 02, 2014, 03:06:41 PM »
Hi,

 Depending on the level of complexity of your story, you could consider XmlMaker, a way to read xml data and use xPath to query for a particular node, this would work in your case, building a xml document model that reflect the possible choices for each paragraph and where the lead.

https://hutonggames.fogbugz.com/default.asp?W1133

However, this is quite advanced, so if you are new to Unity and new to PlayMaker, it's definitly not the first project I would consider.

bye,

 Jean
 

Breadman

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Re: How to create a "Choose Your Own Adventure" story game?
« Reply #2 on: January 07, 2014, 01:01:43 AM »
You could try an FSM with a new state for each story point, which would connect to each other through events which directly correspond to choices the player makes. The FSM interface in PlayMaker actually reminds me a lot of a choose your own adventure map, even when it's being used outside of this context.

As Jean said, this sounds like a big undertaking. You would need to stay very organized! Here's how I'd get started:

Level Check/Loader FSM:
Scene 1, (in addition to whatever you have going on for the start of the game), have an FSM which handles the story map. State 1 of this FSM would check every frame for an integer change (let's call the int pathnumber). This level loader FSM would need to persist throughout all the scenes/levels - either make sure it's a part of each new level, or enable "don't destroy on level load" for this FSM.

On change, it would pass to a new state which would check for what number the pathnumber int changed to. You would have a separate action on this state for each unique path/story choice. For each pathnumber, the FSM would pass to a new state to load the matching scene/level number. (each of your scenes/paths will need to be a new level in Unity) After level load is complete, iw dould return to the idle state where it waits for pathnumber to change.

Dialog/Story/Path FSM: You would create a separate FSM within Scene 1 (and each new scene) to handle dialog/etc that drives the story. As soon as the player chooses a path (by clicking dialog, entering an area, etc), this FSM would change "pathnumber" to the appropriate int. Let's say the player walks into a cave and you've decided the beginning of the cave scene is Path 16. This FSM would set "pathnumber" to 16, triggering the level loader FSM to load a new level (level 16).

Within level 16, you'd have a new dialog/story/path FSM to give options for the player choosing more paths specific to that scene.

It's quite a complicated setup, but I think it would work well if you stayed organized! Good luck :D


moviemaker27

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Re: How to create a "Choose Your Own Adventure" story game?
« Reply #3 on: August 25, 2016, 03:26:34 PM »
I'm not a programmer and basically have no idea what you guys are talking about, BUT... we made a few choose your own adventure movies and found some helpful software to write the script. We liked Inklewriter the best, but you might try Twine or Inform 7.