Tips for making a Choose Your Own Adventure book style game?
Hello everyone! I have had Adventure Creator for a few years but I am finally forcing myself to sit down and make something and had a few questions. I have plenty of ideas for full 2D point and click games but figured I would start off a bit smaller and create a simpler, text choice based game to learn a lot before moving to something bigger. I really hope for it to encompass the feeling of one of those classic 70s and 80s Choose Your Own Adventure books that I grew up with.
Does anyone have any ways that could potentially streamline the process up a bit? I have ran through the entire 2D demo creator almost twice now and have picked up a good amount from there and see what I am able to cut from the process of a full point and click experience but if anyone has some ideas beyond what may be obvious to me, that would be very helpful! Anything weird to expect when not using a good chunk of the plugin, small tricks to keep it simple, etc.
One thing in particular I've noticed is when creating new actions in the ActionList Editor of a conversation (which the game will mostly be) and if there is there a way to set the default new action to Dialogue and Play Speech just to save the time of changing the hundreds and hundred that will need to be created for the characters. Anything along these lines are what I am looking for! Thank you in advance and I'm excited to learn these extremely beneficial tools!
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Welcome to the community, @XavierScott.
The default Action can be set in the Actions Manager - just find the Action you want to rely on, and click the cog icon beside it.
In terms of streamlining the process, you'll want to make use of ActionList parameters whenever possible - as these allow you to recycle ActionLists and help to reduce the amount of Actions / ActionLists you have in your project. A tutorial on their usage can be found here.
If by "2D demo creator", you're referring to the 2D tutorial, I'd recommend going through the 3D tutorial as well. It covers more advanced topics than the 2D one, but many of them still apply to 2D games.
An advanced tutorial, covering ActionList parameters, and the concept of "prefabbing" logic, can be found here.
For choice-based game, you're going to want to rely a lot on Conversations. These need not directly involve speech or another character - they're essentially just a way of displaying on-screen options for the Player to choose from.
Keep in mind also that AC is highly scriptable. If you have a very fixed way of playing in mind, it may be worth relying on custom scripting to handle certain things. For example, the "Movement template: 2D first-person" package over on the Downloads page demonstrates how a custom 2D navigation system can be incorporate into your game.
This is all a bit general, though, so if you'd like to know more about anything in particular, just ask and I can advise more specifically.