Best practices for doing fill-in-the-blank puzzle?
Hey folks! New here - loving Adventure Creator so far. I've done the 2D tutorial and started on a game prototype, and I'd love advice on how to go about achieving the following:
What I have here is a scenario where you have a journal you can return to again and again, and in order to progress in the game, you have to fill out pages in it with information you discover in the game.
When you fill out the information correctly, things advance in the game (i.e. new dialogue options open up, new areas of the map open, etc). And as you progress further, new pages with new challenges are added.
My questions are:
Would the diary system be a good way to go about implementing this?
What's the best way to go about implementing this in terms of proper answers to the questions influencing game state? I want to do this leveraging Adventure Creator's system as much as possible, if that's what make sense.
Any guidance would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!
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Welcome to the community, @nadya.
The diary system could likely be leveraged (journal if pages get added at runtime, a document if they're fixed), but only insofar as allowing the player to browse through different pages. For dynamic content, such as letting the player solve puzzles on individual pages, custom scripting would be necessary.
How much, though, really depends on the way you'd like the player to fill in the blanks. Are these Input boxes that they can type in to, or e.g. a dropdown list they can select an option from?
Either way, essentially what you'd be looking at is having a script detect which page is currently open, in a Menu that relies on Unity UI, and then updating that UI canvas accordingly - enabling the various images/interactive elements etc.
If you can share more details on how it'd work in a given example, I can try to offer more specific advice.
So far as influencing AC's game state goes, you'd want to rely on Global Variable(s) to keep track of the player's progress with such puzzles. In the most simple form, a Bool named e.g. "Solved Cat puzzle" would be set to True when solved. You can then rely on AC's Variable: Check Action within ActionLists to alter logic accordingly.
Variables can be updated through Actions, or through script - the Manual's "Variable scripting" chapter, as well as the front page of the Scripting guide, has details.
Chris, thanks so much for your thorough advice.
Here's a specific scenario, for example. You've have three black cats, and for narrative reasons, you need to figure out their three names so that you can tell them apart. The cats have subtle differences between them, and you need to talk to various people and look for clues that will help you to determine which cat has which name. Once you fill out all three cats' names correctly, a character leaves a room, another character gives you a new quest, and a new room/scene becomes unlocked.
Right now, they're going to be simply input boxes for simplicity's sake. But in the future, I wanna do better UI, but for purpose of getting to a playtest quick, that's the current implementation I've decided is easiest.
Update: I have figured out how to do it! Thanks so much for making such a great tool that made it easy for me, and nudging me in the right direction.