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A point & click adventure game, how to start?

H

Howl1ngW0lf

Guest
Hi Everybody. I'm new to GMS2 and this forum and in search of useful guides or tutorials. I can find a lot of information on how to create platformers, but I want to create a point and click adventure game, but don't know how to start. I was wondering if I missed a tutorial on that subject or if you guys could point me in the right direction?

Thanks in advance!
 
R

Rukiri

Guest
Step 1: Target Windows 3.11 and Windows 95
Step 2: Pick a theme
Step 3: Profit?

In all actual seriousness, since it's a point and click adventure most if not everything can be used by the mouse event then things like dialogue and items can be created like normal. Items I'd use a ds_list and map.

Also since it's a point and click game, 640x480 or 800x600 is a must ;)
 
I advise starting small, like create an object the responds to your mouse clicks. Maybe make the object bring up a text box or change colors when clicked on or something. It won't be much but hey it's a good starting point.
 

Yal

šŸ§ *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
@Rukiri has a point about the mouse events, you get pointing and clicking pretty much 'for free' using the Mouse Left Pressed event. What you could be interested in checking out once you're more comfortable with that:
  • Inventory system
  • System that lets you select an item for interaction, and interactible objects might potentially have different responses when certain items are used on them
  • Permanence of changes on a screen (e.g. once you pick up the pavement stone from the hole in the road, it's gone permanently)
  • Changing the cursor based on what you're hovering over
  • NPC dialogue, possibly with dialogue trees
  • Saving and loading the game
 

crisiworks

Member
Hmm... for me point and click games are mostly about an interesting story and world since the mechanic itself is not mesmerising. I'd start with a solid interesting world where the scenes and items build curiosity and suspense
 
A

Aleksandar Gavrilovic

Guest
In my opinion, Gamemaker is a great tool to start doing PnC. It allows you to prototype an easy PnC engine to suit your needs (whether it's the coin interface, verb interface or just left-click-for-all interface), and it allows for easy creation of minigames which most modern PnCs need in abundance.

Here's some point and click games I worked on with Gamemaker this year:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/550990/Viktor_a_Steampunk_Adventure/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/663240/All_You_Can_Eat/

In my experience the most important thing to know is that PnC games are yrev very dialogue heavy. Branching dialogue branches into new branches and so on. A game lasting 4-5 hours could well exceed 10.000 lines of dialogue. This means you MUST make it easier for yourself (and the rest of your team) to write dialogue. Don't hardcode and don't use intricate / complicated / nested / xml / json / whatever stuff. It has to be super easy to read, translate, and so on. I like the program "Ink" and for Viktor I recreated the syntax of Ink inside Gamemaker. I'd recommend first trying to solve that problem and then moving on to all the other problems which are simple in comparison (coding some sort of inventory, gui, saving and loading, etc).
 
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