Advice & Thoughts on using AC for unusual game design

itchykittehs

I am in the early design phase of making a somewhat unusual mashup of genres. Thematically it's a party or even warband type of rpg, where you start out as a single unit and fight, develop your character's abilities, and convince other units to join you.

The game 3 main views, and probably some number of smaller window screens.
The main view is an overhead map.
The combat view is entirely text based, like a MUD.
The specific location or I'm calling it the zone view is what I want to ask about here.

You can encounter zones and other areas on the map and 'descend' into them. At which point you enter a number of 'rooms' that you navigate through with WASD or arrow keys or mouse. You cannot see any map here, only the room you are in, and up to four 'exits' defined by North, South, East, and West, which connect to other rooms. Each zone may have something in the order of 20-50 rooms.

The room has a visible Title, an Image, and possibly other properties including encounters, npcs, items, flags etc.
This question definitely bridges into general Unity questions, but I figured I would ask here first if anyone is willing to share some advice, it's my first time trying to use unity, I am an experienced web developer.

Are there any parts of AC that I should look into for experimenting with these encounter zones? Also, it seems like this would be a single 'Scene' in Unity? That populates with dynamic room information based on some xy coordinates or something?

Thanks for your time and thoughts!

ChrisIceBox

Welcome to the community, @itchykittehs. Would this be for a 2D game?

Yes, I'd say having one scene would be best here. There's a few ways you could do it, depending on need. One way would be to have each room generated / spawned in as needed, or you could have them all present at once and teleport between them.

The two advanced AC topics I'd recommend looking into would be:

1. ActionList parameters, which let you dynamically set Action fields at runtime, so that they can be re-run at different times for different situations.
2. Custom events, which let you run additional logic or code when AC performs common tasks. These can be scripted, but the Events Editor / Event Runner components also let you run ActionLists without the need for scripting.

The way I'd probably go about things would be to have each Room arranged in the scene in a grid, and then use a custom Room script to store data about each, as well as provide functions to switch between them. It's a concept similar to that used by the "2D First Person" package over on the Downloads page.

This script could handle the placement of the Player, the camera, as well as update a Global String variable that is shown in a Menu to handle the visible Title you mention. Something along these lines:

using UnityEngine;
using AC;

public class Room : MonoBehaviour
{

    public string title;
    public Room upRoom, downRoom, leftRoom, rigtRoom;
    public _Camera camera;
    public PlayerStart upPlayerStart, downPlayerStart, leftPlayerStart, rightPlayerStart;

    public void GoUp ()
    {
        if (upRoom == null) return;
        upRoom.downPlayerStart.PlacePlayerAt ();
        upRoom.camera.MakeActive ();
        GlobalVariables.GetVariable ("RoomTitle").TextValue = title;
    }

    // etc

}

Triggers along each edge (or Hotspot interactions if preferred), could then run the appropriate Room function using the Object: Call event Action.

I'm touching on some of AC's more advanced topics, however, so I'd recommend familiarising yourself with AC a little beforehand - installing the sample scene from the New Game Wizard should be enough to introduce AC's key concepts.

itchykittehs

Thankyou Chris, I super appreciate it! Yeah it's for a 2D game. I'll look into those sections, I think clearly I need to do some playing around with Unity in general it seems like as well.