[Scrim]

(With apologies to the guy in the other thread.) =)

I haven't been doing much work on game projects for the last few months but lately I have been thinking about what my next project should be. I've only done one RPG, and it was the small one I made for the compo last year. One thing that really surprised me was how much time and effort it took to produce the content (art, maps, dialog, scripted events, etc) and integrate it into the game.

So, I'm looking for advice on how to make that part of game creation go more smoothly. One thing I know would speed up the process is having a really good map editor. The one we used for the competition was a fairly awkward program I hacked together myself. It supported basic placement of tiles in different layers and had an undo stack, but that was about as fancy as it got. Adding combat encounters was a matter of placing a "trigger" on the map and then writing some text by hand to integrate it.

It's obvious to me that this can be improved, and I hope to find/make a better map editor for the next time around. I'm looking for suggestions about what other things I can do to help with "building" the game.

Do you guys have any advice on how to make the content creation and integration process easier?

[DeveloperX]

Mappy is good. so is Tile Studio.

I know you use Mac OS, and those are windows programs.
I think that there is a windows emulation layer for a mac somewhere..

I use linux, and use Wine to run all my windows software.
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Rambling Indie Games, LLC

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[Ninkazu]

Content creation can get extremely complex if you use some weird binary format you come up with. If you work more with LUA or another scripting language, you can make simple hooks into your engine that will load in content you write into the script.
You can also go the XML route. There are probably a bunch of good XML editors out there for free.

The key is making your engine as open to extensibility as you can make it without introducing complexity. This allows you to make last minute changes or additions without having to rewrite the whole game.

Making maps is really a tricky situation. Tiled allows you to write your own plugins so if you want to add an xml attribute to a tile such as "run this script", it's fairly straightforward. You should take a look.

[Scrim]

Thanks guys. I guess the key, as you guys said, is flexibility, and you really need to plan for it from the start. When I wrote my RPG engine I didn't put much thought into how content integration would work - hence, the difficulties I ran into. Next time I'll make sure scripting support is part of the initial design.

I'll take a look at the map editors you mentioned.

[Mattias Gustavsson]

[DeveloperX]

well there is _one_ way to make it a lot easier as far as getting the content for your game; and that is to use existing content that is in the public domain. But yeah focus on planning out your game prior to starting writing any code for it and things should go smoother.

Another thing that I like to do is to create test-modules for each feature that I am working on. So lets say that I need to test the player animation system, instead of adding the code for that to my main game code, I just toss together a simple test demo of the animation system and once its all working how I want, then I know that I can integrate it into the main code without too much trouble.

Always build things modular so that you can easily add and remove different components as needed.

Depending on what language you are using (I'm assuming Python since you used that last) this can be a simple trivial task(Python, Ruby, Lua) or complicated (C++)

Think about what makes a game a game, think about what all games have in common, think about what basic elements you need to have for your game, think about how those elements will need to be controlled, and how they interact. All this thinking will help you to create a structure for your game that is easily maintained, easily extended, and if you work it out enough, you might be able to build a system that you can reuse for several games.

Goodluck, and as I said before, if you have any questions regarding Python, Pygame, or any other languages, just let me know and I'd be more than happy to help you out.
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[Hajo]

[DeveloperX]

[Verious]

Here's a link to Tiled, the map editor Ninkazu mentioned.

Description of Tiled from the website:

[RedSlash]

I think the above mentioned tiled was a pretty good one and does run on Mac. Its quite good for general tile based games.

[valderman]

[Rainer Deyke]

That XML looks painful.

Really, what you want isn't a GUI tool but a reasonable scripting language. Writing dialogue in a GUI tool is as painful as coding any other game logic in a GUI tool. Here's what that XML mess would look like in Ren'Py:

[Mattias Gustavsson]

[Verious]

[Hajo]

Each "dialog" would be a description of the situation (aka some NPC talk) and a list of responses to it.

For each of the responses there'd be a link to another "dialolg".

If you have a dialog sequence with many steps and branches, I find it very difficult to get an idea of the whole tree if the dialogs are kept in text files. To see which paths are possible. Thus I'm looking for a tool to visualize the dialog tree (or graph if it allows circles).

The XML files are great to keep the data. But I wouldn't want to create dialog trees on this base. At least my memory is too weak to have like 30 "dialogs" with all their links in my head to check if all paths make sense and if they are complete. I hope a visual representation will help to edit such trees or graphs more easily.

I've once created a kind of "mind map" display for articles (needs Java browser plugin):

http://library.simugraph.com/relview/index.html

If you now imagine each box containing an NPC talk (or situational description), and each link to another box as PC response (or action), it will shape a dialog graph.

To me this is a much more comprehensible visualization than an XML file. If I cannot find a better tool for the dialogs, I'll try to dig out the old source code and expand this applet for editing dialogs (while on the webpage there is a read-only version, the code was meant to edit such graphs interactively - edit boxes contents, add links, move boxes around)

Edit: Rainer's example is nice, but it's only 1 level of talk and response. Imagine that script with 4 or 5 nested levels of dialog. While it looks good with this one level, it will be quite difficult to read with 3 or more levels.

If you then decide a nested form is difficult to read and put every 1-level dialog in a new file/place, it's hard again to get an overview.