So, hello! I am new here. You can call me Carlos, haha. Okay, I have had an idea in my head for a while now and I am dead set on making it. So please do not steal it from me otherwise I'll set my dogs on you. And they have passports so they can go overseas to find you. I have had a lot of experience with RPG Maker VX Ace so if I can't make I'll just make it in that engine haha. But it's not what I want. I like the Adventure Game Studio engine. I've done a tutorial on it but I am not sure if it can do what I want. So let me tell you my game IDEA.
STORY LINE:
There are four kids plus one, so five. But the plus one kid is the player/you! These four kids all have had problems at school or within their life or with their family, they've all had some kind of complication. And they all have different nicknames. And one day you all decide that you want to escape from reality and just live a totally different life without pressure and without stress. So they all steal one of their parents car and just go on a huge ass road trip together. And that's the story. The game's supposed to be very surreal and artsy. Almost as though they are living in a dream. I do a lot of art so what do you expect. Throughout the game you can find out a lot or very little about each character and you can experience many different situations and meet a lot of interesting people. And it's all about their journey. Their aimless journey across the world. So, of course, there are multiple endings. But if you manage to find out all the character's real names (whether it be through one play through or through multiple) then you get a kind of New Game+ option. Where after you steal the car and are about to leave in the dead of the night you can say "Imagine if the world gets overrun by zombies while we are out. Haha..." and if the player selects that option then a completely new, smaller, narrow game route is opened up to the player where they experience their road trip while going through a zombie apocolypse.
GAME PLAY:
So the is how I'd like the player to play the game. This is also where different aspects of those visual novel and point and click adventure style games come through. So there will be parts where you just talk to characters and say different things to them. So I'd like a lot of dialogue branches. And I want to be able to have some of the things you say to them and the actions you make during the puzzle effect the story. And therefore branch out and each play through will give you one heck of a different story. There will be conversation scenes and puzzle scenes.
PUZZLE SCENE (excuse my horrid drawings they were done in a hurry haha)
So this is what I'd like the puzzle scenes to look like. So it's all from the player's perspective. So there is no character that walks around the screen. it's all from the player's perspective. As though you were there and this is what you are seeing. And clicking on different things can make different thoughts pop up. In the bottom right corner is the inventory GUI. Clicking on that backpack it will open up the inventory screen where you can click on different items you have collected and use them to interact with the environment. Like a key on the door kinda puzzle thing. But there won't changeable cursor options. I find that too time consuming haha, it annoys me when you have to cycle through a variety of options (look at, pick up, talk to, use, smell, inspect etc.) There are just too many in my opinion. It's simpler to just have on action so that when you click it interacts with it. So there's like one option which is interact. And then if you hover your mouse over the gate it changes cursor into an arrow or something so that the player knows that they can travel in that direction. And if you hover over another object the cursor image changes into a hand or something to show that they can interact with whatever they are hovering over. So let's say the character clicks on that little dude by the car...
CONVERSATION SCENE
Wow! Some graphics appeared haha, that's what I want. I don't want the text appearing over the image's head I want a closeup detailed bust of the character and underneath the text to appear in a box. Similar to the RPG Maker text boxes. And then you can answer and ask questions. And if you use an item on the characters on the puzzle scenes, images like this will appear and the character says something. If your the player is talking to himself/herself then just the text box wrill appear and there is no dimming of the bg and no bust will appear. When you click on the character the text will appear in a type writer style along with a "blip blip blip" sound effect that can vary in pitch to simulate a high pitch voices and a lower pitch voices. I'd also love to be able to use that lip-syncing feature where the mouth animation moves according to what letters are used (like in AGS).
WHAT I AM ASKING:
So the purpose of this post is to ask: Is this possible? Are there any simple programs that I can use to create this simple game with complex needs haha. It focuses on story more than the puzzles, but I still want the puzzles to be a part of the experience. So here's a rundown of the things I'd like to be able to do:
- point and click adventure puzzles
- visual novel styles dialog branches
- multiple endings
- new game+
- visual novel style conversations
- lip-syncing, type writer letter by letter animation, "blip blip blip" talking sfx
- simple click actions rather than cycling through the needless variety of different ways to interact
- no player character mapped onto the screen that walks around
I know I am asking for a lot, but I am so keen and dead set on making this game. It'll probably take a couple of months to draw out, map out, create puzzles, and map out the routes you can take but I am dedicated to this game. I am doing uni as well so this'll probably take a year to make haha nooooo oh well.
I am open to opinions and critique and i don't mind if i have to do some cheapo kinda fake it kinda things to make it work. I don't mind learning to code either, as long as it doesn't take 35.32 years to learn.
Thank you for taking time to read this as well. I know it's really long but I just wanted to be coherent and so that you guys can understand. See you later skaterrrr!
