Adventure Creator - Make 3D adventure games (DEMO, VIDEO, WEBSITE)

Hiya Chris Everyone -

I'm really loving Adventure Creator and have a lot of the basics in and working without problem. I do have two subjects that I wanted to ask about:

Use/Examine Interactions Cursors - I have many hotspots that have both a Use and Examine Interaction. I basically want the user to look at something and have information come up but also have the ability to "use" it (sort of like the old Sierra Online games...you could basically attempt multiple functions on one object). Now, by default, it seems like it will only change the cursor to the Use interaction icon if both are being used. If only Examine is being used, then the Examine cursor will show up. How would I display both icons if I wanted to? I was thinking about The Walking Dead's interaction model and if there's something that has multiple interactions, then the main cursor is full size but there's a smaller scaled version of the alternate interaction next to it (or maybe it's below it) and then the user can mousewheel over to the other, making the first cursor icon smaller and the next icon full size. Would there be a way to do something like that relatively easily? Or maybe just displaying both icons side by side if a hotspot has both interactions available?

Title Screen Main Menu - I'm basically wanting to create a title screen that leverages the Adventure Creator menu system and thinking of ways of implementing this quickly. Idea would be to have a scene in Unity that is a camera looking at some landscape stuff, with the main logo as a 2D pane, and then having menu options for Start Game, Load Game, Options, and Quit. I don't want the scene to be paused like the current menu works. I want there to be just some general environmental animation happening in the background with some music playing. I'm sure this is pretty easy to put together, but I've never done menu stuff in Unity and curious if I can use Adventure Creator easily for this. Anyone have any thoughts?

Thanks a bunch!

 

That's actually a bit of an oversight on my part - if you make one hotspot with a single "Use" interaction set to the Examine icon, and another hotspot with a single "Examine" interaction, the player wouldn't know the first requires a left-click and the second a right. Your second suggestion looks the more elegant, I will implement this in the next update. Thanks for pointing it out!

This is easy, though you will have to dive into the MenuSystem.cs file to add your menu, so be sure to keep a backup when you download updates! Just copy the pause menu, make a new menu called TitleMenu, but change the AppearType to AppearType.Manual. Make sure the menu variable is public, and just call it's TurnOn function in a script.

The movement method for Touch Screen depends on the control style - if you leave it on Point and Click, Touch Screen movement will be just as it is with the mouse. If you're using Direct Control + Touch Screen, you hold a finger down and drag the player around. Think the way you move in Tales Of Monkey Island.

Thanks a lot! Good luck with your system as well.

 

Sounds great, thanks for the bug fix and the recommendation on the menu! I'll give it a shot tonight.

I also noticed a few things dealing with sounds. It seems as though the "relative volume" is more like absolute on the Adventure Creator volume slider. I'm not noticing a difference in volume if I set it at the audio source level, but I do when I make changes to the relative volume slider. I also noticed that if I have a sound flagged to play while paused, it still seems to pause the audio when I pause the game. Finally, would there be anyway that we could have a larger maximum audio fade in/out value? It seems to max at 5 seconds.

Totally separate request, but could we have an option to hide the menu button? Maybe an option in the Interface section? I preferred it being hidden.

Okay...I'll stop being annoying...for now.

Thanks so much!

 

That's how it should work - the "relative volume" replaces the Audio Source's volume value, but also makes sure the volume is relative to the global sound volume of the type (Music, SFX..). This way you can have many sounds with different volumes, but still affect all of them at once from the in-game Options menu.

I believe this is actually a bug in Unity. Many others have reported a similar problem using the ignoreListenerPause property - when that gets fixed, the code in Adventure Creator should work.

I didn't think that would be a request, but fair enough! I'll raise the cap to 10s in next update.

It's only there for demonstration purposes - you're encouraged to tailer the MenuSystem.cs script to meet your needs. I'm considering moving much of the Menu system to a new manager tab, but for now you can simply remove line 108 from the script and the button will be gone:

Code (csharp):

1. menus.Add (inGameMenu);

 

Ah, okay. I was thinking that the relative volume was in relation to the audio source's volume setting, I shall now simply ignore that value and use the Adventure Creator's from here on out!

Great to hear that the menu system might be translated over to a manager tab. I'd love to be able to play with it more without fear of causing the world to explode.

Everything else makes sense, thank you sir! You are a gentleman and a scholar.

 

Hey Chris, I've just gotta chime in and thank you for releasing this substantial plug-in. It's exactly the tool I've been looking for and I hope you continue to support it for a long time to come!

The only question I have at the moment is how to integrate NGUI into your existing menu system. I'm impressed that you've build your own system without ever trying out NGUI, but I think doing that research could be well worth it. No doubt you've got a lot on your plate as is, but this tie-in would give your customers way more in-editor control over the look and feel of their games.

Cheers and thanks again!

 

Hey Chris very excited about the 2D integration. Great work.

 

Hey chris! I bought the kit today and I have only two words: frighteningly awesome! Very easy to use and very intuitive codes, you really only need to enter with the art. Congratulations!

I have a doubt, you used Blender to animate the lip sync of the Brain, right? How you do? Shape keys or bones?

*Sorry for my bad english!

 

Thank you, Wesley! Brain's lip sync animation was all done with bones.

 

Thanks for the suggestion - I'll take it into consideration. Ideally you'd have control over as much as you want without the need for external plugins - I plan to look more into menus after the next update.

 

Hey again! I think I found my first bug and it's related to the conversation system. In many adventure games, the player is expected to fully explore conversation trees and thus click on every conversation option. However, in games like Kentucky Route Zero and The Walking Dead, the player often has to choose between mutually-exclusive conversation options.


When I tried to recreate this type of choice, I ran into a bug that caused conversation options to behave in unpredictable ways. I was able to recreate this bug by doing the following steps in a new project:

1. Setup a new conversation with 6 options, all of which return to the conversation. Let's name these options 1a, 1b, 1c, 2a, 2b, and 2c.
2. Set options 1a, 1b, and 1c to all be enabled by default.
3. Add 3 "toggle option" actions to option 1a, which enable options 2a, 2b, and 2c when the player returns to the main conversation.
4. Add 3 additional "toggle option" actions to option 1a, which disable options 1a, 1b, and 1c when the player returns to the main conversation.


This is the conversation that the player should ideally see:
---------------
1a
1b
1c
---------------
Player chooses option 1a.
---------------
2a
2b
2c
---------------


Here is the conversation that the player actually sees:
---------------
1a
1b
1c
---------------
Player chooses option 1a.
---------------
2b
2b
2c
---------------


I'm not sure what's causing option 2b to show up twice but I think the issue's related to the "toggle conversation option" action. I've tried to debug it for several hours to no avail, can you give me a hand?

 

Of course! Sorry you've spent so much time trying to fix it, I will look into it and get back to you with a short-term fix, and a proper fix in the upcoming update.

(Actually I was just going to post an update-of-the-update, so speaking of which..)

2D Toolkit support!



Still got a little way to go before proper integration is finished, but I've now gotten a 2D Brain walking around the scene. Options for 4- and 8-directional movement. Apologies for the delay in getting this out there, but I feel it's important to provide a full-feature set for it, rather than a quick hack. Other features include (amongst others):

• 2D GameCameras, which allow for "Ken Burns effect"-like panning, for both 2D and 3D sets
• 2.5D GameCameras - which can have background images assigned to them (without cluttering up the scene)
• "Tank controls" option for Direct control movement
• Orthographic GameCameras now supported
• Earthquake effects for all camera types
• The Variable: Set Action can now be used to assign random variables
• An option in the Scene Manager to show/hide the NavMesh (as per the Hotspots etc)

I've been planning to submit the update by the end of the week, but it depends on bugfixes like this, which are my main priority. Thanks for the heads-up!

 

In fact, as a really, really short-term fix, you could always create two conversations - one for 1a, 1b, 1c - the other for 2a, 2b, 2c - and instead of returning to the conversation, an option from 1 results in starting conversation 2.

 

Found the culprit, it was to do with the way the Conversation script converts menu slots to active options. I'll include the fix in the upcoming update, but for now - open up Conversation.cs (inside Scripts/Logic) and replace the ConvertSlotToOption function with the following code:

Code (csharp):

1. private int ConvertSlotToOption (int slot)
2. {
3.     int foundSlots = 0;
4.    
5.     for (int j=0; j < options.Count; j++)
6.     {
7.         if (options[j].isOn)
8.         {
9.             foundSlots ++;
10.             if (foundSlots == (slot+1))
11.             {
12.                 return j;
13.             }
14.         }
15.     }
16.    
17.     return 0;
18. }

 

Awesome! Thanks, Chris.

Yesterday, I tried your "conversations inside of conversations" solution and I actually like this workflow much better for the game I'm making! Working with separate conversation objects feels much less tedious and prone to human error than dealing with dozens of toggle actions, IMHO.

 

Good work there! It's good to know it will run also on orthographic cameras.

About navmeshes, when on pure 2D (not 3D scenery/characters) with foreground/background planes, I think I prefer to use a navmesh perpendicular to the camera, with the scale value attached to its vertexs or triangles, or something like that, like with classic adventures' walking boxes... That way, you can avoid the scary 3D mesh creation to all those 2D-only adventure creators coming from AGS/Visionaire engines.

At first in my test I used a poly-creation tool inside unity, to avoid going to Maya and back. I wanted to customize it to add scale and color tint per navmesh vertex to apply it to the characters. But finally, I used the 2DToolkit collider editor, for the whole background sprite. You can create as many 2D boxes (islands) with its easy interface and it runs as a navmesh once you attach a constant ID and navmesh scripts. The colliders from 2DTK right know forms one mesh (although I tried not connected islands and it still works), but there will be multiple colliders on the next version, so I think they could be used as different 2D boxes with, I hope, different properties so I can attach scale/tint calls or scripts to them.

Obviously when dealing with 3D or 2.5D adventures this is not possible and you need a 3D navmesh.. but if you are doing 3D characters you already know how to do it

 

You make a good point - 2D game designers should ideally be able to make their games without the use of 3D software, but I think dealing with things like scale values attached to vertices could cause things to get confusing. Perhaps if a perpendicular drawing were able to project itself somehow onto the floor.. I wasn't aware of 2DToolkit's collider editor, I'll check that out.

Speaking of which, 2DToolkit support is now live! Check the changelog in the first post for full details, but this release brings a whole bunch of new features and fixes. 2D and 2.5D games are now possible (though for the moment, 2DToolkit is required for sprite animation), and I've squeezed in a few smaller requests as well.

I was actually expecting the update to go live next week, so I don't quite have the new batch of tutorials ready in time yet, but they'll be live in a few days. For now, the manual should cover what to do.

 

Chris, I missed a field for the translation of the dialog options, we can only change the lines that the character can speak.

 

Will these new tutorials only cover 2-D or will they (hint, hint) also include the other two controllers?

 

Fantastic asset Chris.

Could you integrate Unity's built-in pathfinding? Then we could use Unity's automatic NavMesh generation in the Editor instead of having to use a separate 3D modelling application.

Pathfinding and NavMesh generation are available to both Unity and Unity Pro. Dynamic obstacle avoidance is Pro-only, but probably not required for most adventure games anyway.

 

Righto, I'll add it to the todo.

I can give a tut on XBox controller support, but Touch Screen amounts to little more than choosing an option from a list. I'll demonstrate in a video for sure, though.

I'll be looking into options for expanding the NavMesh system this week. I was under the impression that this was Pro-only, thanks for the heads up.

 

No- I was interested in tutorials on how to set up and use:
Direct control
First person control

 

No problem. Direct control:
[video=youtube_share;DC8Ln_J_SBM]http://youtu.be/DC8Ln_J_SBM

and First-Person control:

[video=youtube_share;2Gxusy1ajW0]http://youtu.be/2Gxusy1ajW0

2.5D and 2D tutorials tomorrow!

 

Thanks. Again, very nice tutorials.

 

Nice Chris!

One more question, how could I make a interactive cutscene, for example with the player jumping off a building and have to click on a rope attached to a helicopter to not show the "cutscene death"?

 

Wow, I'm looking forward to seeing that!

Quite simple to set up:
1) Make the opening cutscene, in which the "rope" hotspot is turned on for the player to click on
2) Put a timer on your "death cutscene", and run it as the opening cutscene ends (change the opening cutscene's final action "After running" field to cutscene, and pick the "death cutscene". The timer should be set to as much time as you want the player to have to click on the rope.
3) When the player clicks on the rope, kill the death cutscene (ironically ) - use the Object: Send Message action to send a "Kill" message to the "death cutscene", and this will prevent it from running when the timer runs out.

 

Man, so many good tips. There needs to be a wiki!

 

Great! I tried it, good implementation hehe I got it running more or less, but I get a bit confused with orientations (start point, camera, char gameobject and sprite child). I'll wait for the tutorial to see those things...

On multiple player characters... I've been looking into it with some results. I did not implement it completely, but anyway, this is what I did:

Starting player: Tinpot
Characters
- Tinpot: Taglayer, Layer: ignore raycast, Scripts: Player, NPC, remember NPC, hotspot, Player script enabled, everything else disabled
- Brian: Tag:untagged, Layer: default, Scripts: Player, NPC, remember NPC, hotspot. Player script enable = false, everything else, true

I did a new action to change the active player. It just does:

For the actual player: Player script puts to off, npc, remember npc, hotspot, enabled. Tag = untagged. Layer = raycast
For the new player: Player script enabled, npc, remember npc, hotspot, disabled. Tag = player.

The scripts PlayerInteraction and PlayerMovement keep a local reference to the player, so I added a setter to Player. In the action I update the player calling those setPlayer(new_player). Surely it will be needed to change the player at the global settings for savesystem and instantiate it on different scenes.

And It seems to work. What I didn't do yet... Inventory, save system and players on different scenes, but I've been thinking about them:

For the inventory, there is the PersistentInventory, that is the actual player inventory. I just need to keep a local copy of its content in the actual character (or save a global variable for each player). And when changing the players, load the PersistentInventory with the local inventory (like when loading the inventory on the SaveSystem).

The save system save the actual Player stuff, but it will need to store the local inventories for each player, the scene nº where they are now, and if they are a player or npc right know (both could be global variables). When loading a scene, if there should be a character on this scene and it's not instantiated, It should instance it, not only for the actual player (for NPC/players movility between scenes). And then for each character, I need to update its tags/layers/enable whenever they are NPC/Player right know.

To change to a character that it's at another scene, I will need both players as Player prefabs (with their NPC scripts off). The action for changing players should check if the newPlayer (prefab) exists on the scene, if not, look at the global variable the scene where it is, change the player global settings to the new one, put the actual player as npc and then change scene.

For game scripting, I think a "Actual player is an instance of (char prefab)?" action should be needed to be able to branch gameplay actions for each player (if both players can interact with the same hotspot).

And that's it...

 

It's the inventory, saving and room handling that are the big issues. I think it would also be wise to destroy the current player if switching to a new player in another room. It's definitely the right direction - anyone else out there interested in such a feature becoming built-in?

More tutorials! The new tutorial asset package contains all you'll need.

Making a 2.5D game:

2D cameras:

2D characters:

 

Absolutely!

 

Hah, fair enough!

Next update coming very soon. It's a small one, but brings support for Unity Navigation-based pathfinding. It'll be a per-scene option - you can either use custom meshes (as you can now), or rely on Unity's built-in method by placing down blocks to mark out your walkable-area, and baking the NavMesh. Thanks to Toad and MaaS for the suggestions. Also: XML-based saving for iOS games.

I'm getting this out the door quickly because I think the update that'll follow it may take quite a while - I'll be looking into giving the menu/interface system an upgrade.

 

and

/slowly melts with joy

 

Thanks to you Chris... Great kit and wonderful support.

If there will be official support for multiple playable chars then I'll wait for it

And about the menu/interface system upgrade... dont worry, just take your time

 

Thanks for the support, Chris! Really amazing tool! I'm waiting for the next release!

I'm paid by the hour! Haha!

 

New update 1.15 is out now! Couple of bugfixes relating to First Person mode, but the main new features is an option to use Unity Navigation for pathfinding, instead of a custom mesh.

You'll find a new option in the Scene Manager, where you can select the scene's Pathfinding Method. Switch to Unity Navigation, and a new prefab called NavMeshSegment becomes available. Place down these planes and arrange them to make out your scene's "walkable area", then simply bake it (Window -> Navigation -> Bake).

Thanks. I might have to roll it out in stages, but it's important to do properly or not at all. In the current dev build, I now have a Cursor Manager (which lets you define as many hotspot icons as you want), and am seeing if a Menu Manager is also possible.

 

Hi Chris,

Just wondering if this plays nice with something like Playmaker?

 

This is a bitchin' update, Chris. Has made navigation creation much, much easier. Thanks a bunch!

 

Thanks for the update Chris!

 

You're welcome! More on the way - starting to get somewhere with a Menu Manager. Right now I've only been looking at visual design, but you can now create menus, elements and position them while they update in the Game window in real-time. Still much more to do, but:

I haven't used it myself, but don't see why not. Anyone on the thread had any success?

 

Looks very cool! Will we have the ability to fade color and/or opacity on labels over a set amount of time? Very exciting!

 

Just wanted to say that AC looks great, I've been looking for a tool kit like that for some time. Thanks for your work!

 

At the moment, I'm only bringing the current system from script to a GUI editor - not really extending functionality for now.

I've now managed to port the demo menus over to the new Menu Manager. A few more bugs to fix, but now the question is really how much will be Editor-based, versus done in script. Right now, the visual design of menus is done in an editor, while the handling of button clicks etc is still scripted.

Obviously these changes are to make menu editing-easier for non-coders, but I don't want to limit things for those that can script, since a fully GUI-based menu manager would only be as powerful as the functions I write for it, and probably never fully satisfy everyone's needs.

Be good to hear some opinions on this.

Thanks, you're welcome. I'd been looking for a toolkit like this as well - I was surprised there wasn't one available already.

 

Is there a way to abort action triggered by interaction, like walking toward a marker etc?
Currently when player character walks towards an item, then interface disappears and I cannot abort this by for example clicking somewhere on a ground.
Any easy way to change this behaviour?

Thanks!

 

Is there a way to have more control over the player´s character motor?

My character as a sliding momentum when he stops moving foward before fully stoping.

How could this be avoided?

 

It's not currently possible to cancel an interaction by "clicking off". I will see if I can make it so in an update.

Inside your player's Player script inspector, you'll see a field for acceleration. This works for deceleration too, so you only need to vary that.

 

Hello,
I've just purchased Adventure Creator to make a 2D adventure game with 2d toolkit. I have the hardest time setting the players sprite to be mirrored when walking the other direction.
The way you set it up in the tutorial is you have a different set of animations for the walking left and right. This is a waste of space. I want to simply mirror the sprites when walking the opposite direction. 2d toolkit says to just rotate the sprite, but when I rotate it something in the adventure creator scripts overrides the rotation.

Another issue is my character keeps sliding off the floor. I tried locking Z movement, but he still moves on that axis for some reason. I use direct controls.

 

Adventure Creator "locks off" 2D sprite rotation to ensure sprites are always facing the camera, which can be pointing in any direction. You make a good point about mirroring - I will see if I can make an option for this in the next update.

Are you referring to the sliding momentum mentioned in the post above, or is your character unable to stop when you let go of the controls?

 

When the Menu Manager will come out Chris?
Need to costum the Font size in many ocasions

NGUI integration or similar graphical capabilities (working with sprites and ad scrool menus) would be a great adicion to this stunning pack
So we can pop Gui interface menus like character /NPC stats and info

 

Yet another great addicion would be a toogle button for IOS/Android that would (show/hide) all the hotpoints (since it dificult to get hightlight "mouse-over" on touch interface)

Like in broken sword for Touch devices

 

Sorry for so many posts, but questions just pop in as i study this asset

Is there a way to disable hotpoint from an NPC? my NPC remains clicable/interactive when in "cutscene mode" and it creates bad loops if it is clicked

The fast way i managed to do it , was to create a hotpoint box that identifies the NPC, that way is easily turned off,

But i cant find a way to turn it off if the hotpoint property it is a component from the NPC