happy-ferret / phaser-pnc

Phaser Point and Click Adventure Game Plugin

Phaser Adventure Game Plugin Design Document

Introduction

Plugin to simplify development of traditional point and click adventure games, in the style of Lucasarts, Sierra, etc, in the Phaser/Lazer framework. Open to all collaborative effort, I think there are enough of us oldies to remember the golden age of adventure games :)

From this thread on HTML5 Game Devs forum

Design Considerations

Features typical (but not necessarily definitive) of game style:

• Static 2D backgrounds (‘screens’) with some interactive objects and characters that can move around

• Mouse driven gameplay with the protagonist moving to where the player clicks

• Inventory

• Item combination

• Multiple actions (‘verbs’) that can be used to do different things to the same object (less common in modern games so should be an optional feature)

• Multiple choice dialog system with character subtitles

Technical Considerations

• Level editor (not tile based?)

• Pathfinding over a static background - collision masks or predefined waypoint routes?

• Layered backgrounds allowing for foreground objects

• Save/Load system

• Event triggers to allow for progression - eg having x item enables y dialog option, y dialog option causes person z to arrive in the game

• Character animation system

• Dialog system should be heavily abstracted from the general dev process for ease of writing- maybe even just supplying json files generated by some external tool? While still allowing fine grained programmer control

• Music system

• Modular design? Don’t want to restrict people to using eg requirejs but feel that the components of the plugin should use a module pattern of some description

• Sod it let’s just make a JS SCUMM clone. Though somebody’s probably already done it!

Constraints

• Memory, especially if targeting mobile devices - lots of background images and frame by frame animations = need to be careful with memory usage. Can make use of Phaser’s state system to mitigate this.

• Voice acting? HTML5 sound support is getting much better but could it handle a lengthy game fully voice acted? This is a long way off as I doubt anyone would try this any time soon ;)

Goals

• A flexible enough plugin that it can be used by experienced programmers and novices alike

• Ideally allow for art, writing and coding to be as easy to integrate as possible while remaining separate processes

• Open source, open licensed, go nuts with it

Development Methods

I dunno, get a github started and just do it, we’ll work out how later