New Template Game

[gumby]

I think this idea has been tossed around before, but as far I know it has not been acted upon.  I was thinking along the lines of something more than the traditional template, perhaps a full working mini-game.  Fully documented - maybe we could take the tutorials & how-to's and implement all the examples.  Best practices implemented - if they exist or can be determined via discussion.

For sure, I'd like to cover the parser with adequate examples (I feel like I can probably handle this part).  A full working inventory would be a good idea based on the threads lately.  A point-and-click version would be nice.  Sound & music would be good too.  Coverage of views, pics, animation, etc.

I'm looking for help and/or ideas...

[MusicallyInspired]

I think we should keep the Template Game as is for the bare minimum of it. The idea of a new and more feature-loaded "Tutorial Game", however, definitely has merit! The "quests" in the game would be about explaining the different features and functions that haven't been particularly clear. Perhaps this is why SCI never really took off like AGI did. It just wasn't as well documented. Granted AGI is pretty straightforward anyway, seemingly, but even so.

We could implement as many examples of popular and necessary SCI features we can think of. A title screen with buttons a user can either select by keyboard, shortcut, or mouse clicks for example. Basic and advanced inventory checking and handling. Changing Ego's "clothes". Adding the "StopWalk" feature troflip helped me out with ages ago (where when the ego stops moving the view changes to another separate view with stopped frames). And if anyone thinks of more features they can request it and it can be added in in some way. It'd be a neat group project we could all build upon. Basically, it should contain working examples of anything we can think of that can be used in an SCI game.

[Cloudee1]

Didn't I stick a copy of the pnc template up somewhere around here...

[Collector]

It is with your PnC tutorial.

[gumby]

Yeah, a 'Tutorial Quest' game sounds really good.  But how best to present it?  I for one don't think I'd have the patience to play through a paced tutorial - but I suppose one wouldn't have to...

What about utilizing one room per problem/subject?  So the player could skip rooms via teleport or just walking.  In each room indicate what the relevant code scripts are - maybe embed it in the background of the room, or display a dialog when a specific command is entered 'show code' or something.

Rooms could build on one another, or could be stand-alone.  Perhaps both, stand-alone for isolation and clarity of a problem, and aggregated rooms for 'here's how is all works together'.  Or maybe a final room with all features implemented.

[MusicallyInspired]

Yeah, separate rooms is what I was thinking. You could have each room be selected from the title screen so people can just click to which tutorial they want to go.

It'd also be nice if the source could be loaded with comments explaining how everything works, too.

[gumby]

Nice, I like the idea of being able to select a room from the title screen. 

Another thought that just came to me - perhaps a 'step through the code' option could be selected & the code being executed could be displayed in the background as it's executing, line-by-line.  Shouldn't be too difficult, just a matter of adding a Display() & a keypress input.  Maybe also display a comment where appropriate as well.

I'll start putting together a list of a few rooms & how the subject of each might be approached.

[MusicallyInspired]

Cool!

[gumby]

Not sure when I'm going to get more time to tackle this, but here goes...

Here's the list of 'rooms' I came up with, largely based on the existing tutorials and examples.  I grouped them into categories to keep things organized.

Text:
- Said(), Parser
- Text resources (inventory, print statements, etc).
- Displaying text - Print(), Display()
- Multi-language support

UI:
- User Interface (buttons, windows, gauges), Menubar, Save/Restore
- Keyboard functions, Keypad class, Using specific keyboard keys
- Mouse functions, PNC

Graphics:
- Control lines/areas
- Doors
- Props
- Inventory
- Actors, Avoid, Follow

Misc:
- Scoring, Death Handling, Winning the game
- Regions and locales
- Loopers
- Music & Sound
- Timers, Turns
- Selectors

[lskovlun]

Proper demonstration of regions and locales is, pretty much by definition, not  suitable for a single room. On the other hand, you manage in your post to mention four excellent candidates for regions/locales. Now if only we could come up with some appropriate actions/events for them.

[MusicallyInspired]

Well, it's been 4 years, but this idea still has merit. All the more now that Companion is getting a much needed facelift. This could be a great community project, actually. And it would be doubly beneficial because things various contributors have trouble with and have questions about while making the game can be explained and implemented when they come up.

[Collector]

If Companion ends up being complete enough to create SCI1 and SCI1.1 games we will need new template games for those as well. Brian's VGA template is just SCI1 and is not quite complete. He had most of the scripts done, but none of the other SCI1 resources. It looks like that SCI1.1 may be given preference over SCI1 and it will probably need a different template. I am sure that troflip's work on the decompiler will be of immense help here. The other resources would not be that big of a deal after there are proper editors.

[MusicallyInspired]

Yes right on. Template games as well as Tutorial games.

Part of me desperately wants an SCI01 template game so I can use scrolling screen transitions in EGA...I'm so unreasonably hopeless lol.

[gumby]

I've been kicking around this idea too, but from a code-generation standpoint. After Soulshade Asylum, I'm thinking about how to get a better end-result in less time.

One of the low-hanging fruits that I see is a tool that will accept input as the game-player would input (e.g. "pick up the small rock"), generate the necessary vocab words, identifying parts-of-speech and possible synonyms, then generate the said strings themselves in a global or possibly region script.

[troflip]

These updates to SCI Companion are a ton of work, so I would greatly appreciate any work by the community to create a template game.

I'm probably going to focus on SCI1.1, and I can come up with the meat of a template game based on the decompiler, but I'll probably need the community's help in polishing it up, and *especially* in documentation. We can probably do this through github.

I'll leave a SCI01 template game up to Brandon