No Character

Messenger

Hi there,

I would like to see if I can use Adventure Creator without a playable character. What I mean by that is no onscreen representation of the player, so no character walking around. 

I want to create a game where the player looks at a scene and interacts with elements in it, think about Papers Please to get an idea of what the game would play like. 

Can this be done with Adventure Creator?

Thanks!

ChrisIceBox

A player character is not required.

Papers Please involves dragging 2D elements around, which cannot be done in AC.  2D interactions in AC are limited to single-clicking (see the 2D Demo).  3D interactions, however, can involve the physical manipulation of objects (see the Physics Demo).

Alverik

Well, when there's some scenes where I want no player, I simply have an invisible box as the player (completely constrained), in 3D that would be more than enough to lock the screen, then you could run interactions without waiting for the player to reach the hotspots. Now, I'm not very familiar with 2D, but I've been checking a video of this "Papers, Please" and my only guess is you could give it a shot at faking the effects by using the UI smartly. 

In the case that you want the same layout, you could have the whole button part of the Screen as a UI.

You could make your own Unity GUI for the drag and drop effect, or if you aren't very familiar with unity UI you could try using AC's inventory boxes (following the AC tutorial on inventory bars, with Unity UI, using either in scene or in prefab UIs). the inventory box element , if I remember well, already has a drag-able feature for the slots/buttons (just remember to omit the grid layout when you make the element).

I should say, though, that some stuff seem more tricky to do, like changing the graphic from one to another - when you drag something from a viewport to another, but I'm sure it could be accomplished with a bit of scripting. 

Personally, if I was trying to mimic "Papers, please", I would use a Unity UI connected to AC for most of the gameplay, the top part I would leave it as a regular 2D Scene (with nothing on the bottom, as it would not be visible anyways), this top viewport would then respond to the player's actions in the gameplay area (bottom - UI side). But scripting would be mandatory to change graphics as stuff gets dragged between viewports and to determine the UI states necessary to trigger events. You could still take great advantage of most of the rest of AC's systems, like for saving, managing music, triggering events or other actions/code using actionlists (specially action lists attached to inventory items, in case you use the AC inventory box approach)

Anyways, thats just my two cents.