Branching Narrative / Narrative choices

dynast79

Hi,
Before starting my project with AC I would like to know if it allowed in its system to create a branching narrative game with, for instance, multiple endings to the game and/or multiple solutions to a puzzle or dialogue that leads you into a specific narrative branch ?
Also to follow this idea ; an UI map that show the Branchs would be accessible to the player so he could see which branch he's going through.

Is it possible to do that using AC core system ? Or is it heavy custom Scripts ?

Thanks, AC seems to be a wonderful tool.
My best,
F

ChrisIceBox

Welcome to the community, @dynast79.

For the logic itself: yes. You can use Global Variables and/or Objectives to keep track of what the Player has to do, and the choices they've made, and read their values at any time to run different blocks of logic accordingly.

For the UI map: exactly how it works/displays will be based on your game's specific needs, so you'd need to rely on custom scripting here. However, you can still rely on AC's data to keep track of things, and then read their values through script. See the front page of the Scripting Guide for an example on accessing variables in code.

Off the top of my head, one approach you could take would be to have each visible choice by an Objective - defined in the Inventory Manager - which the Player can then either Complete or Fail using the Objective: Set state Action. Through script, you can get this data with:

var completedObjectives = KickStarter.runtimeObjectives.GetObjectives (ObjectiveDisplayType.CompleteOnly);
var failedObjectives = KickStarter.runtimeObjectives.GetObjectives (ObjectiveDisplayType.FailedOnly);

With completedObjectives and failedObjectives both being arrays of the ObjectiveInstance class, which can be used to extract e.g. the Objective's name, description text etc to be displayed in UI Text boxes.