February Devlog - Adventure Games

Hello again! Welcome to the adventure game framework devlog! This post is going to be going into detail on the new dialogue and adventure game systems I've been developing for use in Rockin' Resort and future titles. But first...

What about Catgirl Care?

Catgirl Care and Catgirl Care Chibi are still in development! I expect these two titles to take a bit longer to develop than my standard story-focused titles, so I'm going to be sorta leap-frogging development. This means that I'll be focusing on development for Catgirl Care most of the time while taking occasional weeks or months off to work on projects like Rockin' Resort. This will primarily be after releases (like Alpha 0.1) but there's no set schedule for the time being.

Regarding Catgirl Care in specific, I may end up using this adventure game system. It's too early to say for sure, but the dialogue component in specific is fairly robust and may make for good choice-driven cutscenes.

Adventure Game Framework?

I've spent most of my game development career on visual novel-style mechanics (even Lust Potions used a visual novel system for dialogue). I find myself drawn to visual novels as I love good characters and I feel dialogue-focused game mechanics are relatively unexplored to the point of often being misunderstood in western game development. That said, I've been researching the history of visual novels to see what ideas I could bring to my own games and I've come around to a concept I've found exciting.

Ready for a history lesson?

Visual novels are a (predominately Japanese) style of interactive fiction that can be traced back to some of the earliest games ever developed. Before there were shooters, platformers, or epic RPGs, we had text-based adventure games.

You may be familiar with text-based games more-so from parodies unless you're a severe nerd (like me). Your primary method of interaction in these games is often typing out commands into a text parser, usually in the format of an action, a space, and then the object to be acted upon. For example: "get ye flask" would produce "You can't get ye flask!" 

(If you'd like to check out this style of game, the BBC has "The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy" available on their site here.)

As computers improved and games evolved, graphical adventure games began to show up. Initially these too used still used typed-out commands but after a while, two distinct styles of adventure game were developed. In the west, we got point-and-click adventure games (like Monkey Island),  where the old "get ye flask" was simplified with a visual interface. Now we could use our hand tool to attempt to take the flask (or use the tongue tool to lick it). 

The second style of adventure game was the Japanese adventure game. While western adventure games focused on puzzle-solving and world interactions, Japanese adventure games focused more on character interactions and choices. A popular example of this style of game is the Ace Attorney series, where the main focus is on probing witness testimony. Often, Japanese adventure games would use a text parser-inspired choice system. This would typically take the format of a list of options (common example: "look/examine/talk to") which would then lead to a sub-menu of topics ("look -> girl" and "talk to -> girl" would produce different results).

Japanese adventure games were common as part of the PC-98 and Windows doujin community, meaning that a lot of sexual games were made in this style which is good for my research purposes. These games are the predecessors of the modern narrative focused visual novels and the reason we refer to textbox formats as NVL (from "novel") and ADV (from "adventure"). If you're interested in trying some of these games, check out The Assenheim Project. They restore classic Japanese visual novels (and adventure games) and make them playable in modern browsers.

All of this brings me to my adventure game framework. My idea (while I'm sure it's not unique) is to mix the dialogue-focused Japanese system with the exploration-focused western system. This mixed system would use western adventure game systems when exploring and the visual novel-style system for character interactions. I'm hopeful that this mix of point-n-click and visual novel systems will allow players more direct involvement compared to my previous narrative-focused games.

The Dialogue Component

Above, you should see a (nsfw) gif showcasing a pretty typical visual novel dialogue system that I've developed in Godot using Inkle's Ink (via inkgd). This dialogue system also features a Japanese adventure game-style "Look, Speak, Touch" menu that (due to Ink) allows for some impressively complex narrative sequences. Implemented into a game properly, this system should allow you as a player more interaction in my games without being a chore on the development end.

Along with the standard visual novel features (hide the ui, a text log, auto, and skip), this dialogue system also supports calling functions (animations for example), setting/getting variables, playing sound files, saving/loading, and a hint system for the adventure game-style menus. It's pretty complicated and plugs nicely into my second system...

The Point-and-Click Component 

While the dialogue component of my adventure game framework is pretty much finished, the point-n-click component is still in early development. 

So far, many of the behind the scenes elements for the point-n-click system work (like inventory management and saving/loading) but lack player interaction. The most important elements (pointing and clicking) work surprisingly well so far. I've even included a hint system that highlights all interactable objects on the screen. 

The ability to re-use each element of my adventure game system is important. For example: while the point-n-click component might not be useful for Catgirl Care, the dialogue component may potentially be used. This re-usablity means that the point-n-click system needs to work in 2D, 3D, or even in a first-person game. This is part of why it's taking a little longer to make compared to the dialogue system (which already supports 2D and 3D). The example above is half 3D and half 2D, but the system doesn't treat either example differently internally. 

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Anyhow, I know this devlog is a lot, but I'm excited about the future games that I'll be able to develop with these tools. I'm going to get back to gamedev work now but you should also expect a short comic introducing those two new characters I showed the WIPs of in the last update some time next month.

Thanks for reading and thanks for your support, everyone!

tl;dr

I'm making an adventure game system for future games that will include point-n-click and visual novel components. Catgirl Care is still in development, but I'll be project hoping between updates. Thanks again for your support!