Is Adventure Creator the right choice for what I'm looking for?

chaosmonger

Hello guys,
I'm mainly a film director/producer and I want to develop a 2D game out of my brand new short film.
Here some pictures taken from it:

And here the trailer: https://youtu.be/AHTn-LBlOjY
I'm mainly a graphic designer/filmmaker, but I've some experience with website coding (html5, flash, etc) and I designed long time ago some simple games.

At the moment I'm mainly looking to understand what's the right engine to develop my game.
Initially I thought to do it in UE4 (I've already a couple of coders for that), but I'm not happy with the final look and I'd like to keep the aesthetic of my short film (that was made in 3D but with cel shading and "flat" rendering), therefore maybe a solution is having an entirely 2D approach.
I love the games developed with Visionaire (like "Deponia", "The whispered World", "The pillars of Earth", "Paradigm", etc.) and I'm aiming for a pretty classic game mechanic. So "Visionaire Studio" was my second choice.

Now I discovered "Adventure Creator" for Unity and, considering it has a larger community than "Visionaire", maybe it could be the right and final choice?

But, just to be sure, I've some questions for you all:

• I want to have two swappable main characters to use, with different inventory and cursors/icons set. Is that doable on Adventure Creator? Is there a way that the 2nd character will follow the 1st without overlapping or messing around? (In most of the game they are together on the same location, but each of them has different "abilities" to solve the puzzles... in some cases they'll be in different scenes)

• How Adventure Creator handle particles, such as rain, dust, etc on a 2D game? Should I use simply PNG sequences (or video) overlying/blending the scene, or can I have a more "3D feeling" blended with 2D flat graphic?

• Can I have puddles reflecting the characters when they step on them or having different shadows when the hero is under a specific light? (all of that possibly in a 2D environment)

• Can the characters look be affected by "light" on scene? For example, if the location is darker, the characters are darker, if the location has a red light, the characters are red, etc...

• I want to make this Adventure Game unique, by adding some random aspects. For example, can objects be placed around randomly choosing from a set of them? (i.e. picking from "tiny branch" / "rod" / "old stick", only one will be on scene, and every game has a different one) And can the locations be generated "procedurally" from a set of "components"? For example a street with different buildings, but each building is placed differently every game, sometime there's a wall, sometime a shop, sometime an alley, etc...

• I aim to have the game in different languages (at least for subtitles, while voice actors will be in English). Is there an easy way to export a language file (.csv or .po) to give to the translator and then re-import it into Adventure Creator and automatically get the new language (for dialogues, objects, etc etc)?

• I'm sure it has parallax, but can I overlap a video (or png sequence) to the entire screen that is not affected by scrolling? (for example if I want a rain effect on top of it, or a quick fast animation of a flying car passing in front of the camera, without getting affect by scrolling)

Last but not Least: Any developer with experience with Adventure Creator and on creating custom scripts/code available to help me? (paid)

Thanks a lot for your support and sorry for the very long thread!!!!

Nicola

ChrisIceBox

Welcome to the community, @chaosmonger.

I want to have two swappable main characters to use, with different inventory and cursors/icons set. Is that doable on Adventure Creator? Is there a way that the 2nd character will follow the 1st without overlapping or messing around? (In most of the game they are together on the same location, but each of them has different "abilities" to solve the puzzles... in some cases they'll be in different scenes)

AC does support player-switching, yes - see the Manual's "Player switching" chapter. When a Player character is inactive, they are replaced by an NPC which can be made to follow the active Player via the Character: NPC follow Action.

How Adventure Creator handle particles, such as rain, dust, etc on a 2D game? Should I use simply PNG sequences (or video) overlying/blending the scene, or can I have a more "3D feeling" blended with 2D flat graphic?

Being a graphical effect, particles are left to Unity, which has its own powerful particle system. You can control their on/off state within AC, but AC is not a graphics tool.

Can I have puddles reflecting the characters when they step on them or having different shadows when the hero is under a specific light? (all of that possibly in a 2D environment)

Again, this is possible but is down to Unity and the shaders you write/use.

Can the characters look be affected by "light" on scene? For example, if the location is darker, the characters are darker, if the location has a red light, the characters are red, etc...

AC features a "Tint Map" feature, which allows you to overlay an invisible texture across the scene that then tints a character's colour by the colour of the texture at the point they're standing at. It's somewhat basic (the whole body will be tinted by the same charater), but is a quick and effective way of getting such effects. Again, though, you can rely on Unity's own lighting and shading tools to achieve the exact graphics you're after.

To be clear: AC is a toolkit on top of Unity that handles the gameplay aspects of an adventure game. It is not a graphical tool, but since it uses Unity you still have Unity's lighting / shading etc tools available to you. If you're looking for clarification on Unity's abilities to perform effects like the above three, then I would recommend posting on the Unity forums.

I want to make this Adventure Game unique, by adding some random aspects. For example, can objects be placed around randomly choosing from a set of them? (i.e. picking from "tiny branch" / "rod" / "old stick", only one will be on scene, and every game has a different one) And can the locations be generated "procedurally" from a set of "components"? For example a street with different buildings, but each building is placed differently every game, sometime there's a wall, sometime a shop, sometime an alley, etc...

This would be tricky, and either heavily reliant on custom coding or complex Action chains to implement. Not being a traditional adventure mechanic, AC doesn't incorporate procedural generation by itself, but you could do this by one of a couple of methods:

1. Implement custom script(s) that make the changes on the fly. This'll be a lot easier if the changes are purely cosmetic (i.e. you're not changing the shape of the NavMesh, location of Hotspots, textures of inventory items, etc), but you'll also have to ensure the changes are persistent when returning to a given scene.

2. Add all the different variants to your game (either multiple objects within the same scene, or create a different scene for each variant), and then use AC's built-in Actions system to change what gets shown. The Variable: Set Action can be used to store a random number when the game begins, and you can then call upon that number (or a range of them), when entering a scene to determine what gets changed.

I aim to have the game in different languages (at least for subtitles, while voice actors will be in English). Is there an easy way to export a language file (.csv or .po) to give to the translator and then re-import it into Adventure Creator and automatically get the new language (for dialogues, objects, etc etc)?

Yes - all of your game's text can be exported to a CSV file, translated, and then re-imported under a different language.

I'm sure it has parallax, but can I overlap a video (or png sequence) to the entire screen that is not affected by scrolling? (for example if I want a rain effect on top of it, or a quick fast animation of a flying car passing in front of the camera, without getting affect by scrolling)

Unity's VideoPlayer component can be attached to a UI Canvas, and so can a sprite animation, so you can use Unity UI to overlay your scene with such an effect. This too is unrelated to AC.

chaosmonger

Thanks a lot Chris for your long and detailed reply! And to taking your time to explain me everything! I think I'm 99% up for developing my game with AC! So be ready for more questions in the near future!!! (and for one more awesome game!)

By the way, I've one more question right away (sorry if I'm asking too much! but I hope my questions will help other users!)

Ok, so I was searching the forum and AC manual to understand how the lip sync work (as well as head turning and other random animations, like occasional blinking).

Considering I'll go for a 2D approach, seems like Sprite Unity Complex is the best option to have more freedom on tuning animations. But I noticed I might go insane detaching the head from the body and handling the layers... so... Can the random occasional blinking or the phonemes be just a limited sprite area on a layer to put on top of the standard Idle of my character? And how's that handled if the idle animation has a bit of head movement? (for example a typical breathing idle in which the head moves up and down). I mean, if I create a series of sprites for the mouth phonemes (or eyes blinking), how can I be sure they are in the exact position?

Thanks again!

ChrisIceBox

Seems like Sprite Unity Complex is the best option to have more freedom on tuning animations.

This is certainly the recommended option for anything beyond the most basic of 2D character setups. It gives you full control over how your character is animated, with AC simply controlling Animator parameters that you allow it to - how you use those parameters is up to you.

Can the random occasional blinking or the phonemes be just a limited sprite area on a layer to put on top of the standard Idle of my character?

You can separate the head and body in both Sprites Unity and Sprites Unity Complex modes for independent head animation/turning - see the Downloads page for examples.

And how's that handled if the idle animation has a bit of head movement?

The technique used by the provided examples is to animate the position of the head within the body animation - so that you can control its position every frame when e.g. walking. The head animation simply involves the changing of the head sprite.