Phaser Adventure Game Plugin Design Document

Introduction

Plugin to simplify development of traditional point and click adventure games, in the style of Lucasarts, Sierra, etc, in the Phaser/Lazer framework. Open to all collaborative effort, I think there are enough of us oldies to remember the golden age of adventure games :)

From this thread on HTML5 Game Devs forum

Design Considerations

Features typical (but not necessarily definitive) of game style:

• Static 2D backgrounds (‘screens’) with some interactive objects and characters that can move around

• Mouse driven gameplay with the protagonist moving to where the player clicks

• Inventory

• Item combination

• Multiple actions (‘verbs’) that can be used to do different things to the same object (less common in modern games so should be an optional feature)

• Multiple choice dialog system with character subtitles

Technical Considerations

• Level editor (not tile based?)

• Pathfinding over a static background - collision masks or predefined waypoint routes?

• Layered backgrounds allowing for foreground objects

• Save/Load system

• Event triggers to allow for progression - eg having x item enables y dialog option, y dialog option causes person z to arrive in the game

• Character animation system

• Dialog system should be heavily abstracted from the general dev process for ease of writing- maybe even just supplying json files generated by some external tool? While still allowing fine grained programmer control

• Music system

• Modular design? Don’t want to restrict people to using eg requirejs but feel that the components of the plugin should use a module pattern of some description

• Sod it let’s just make a JS SCUMM clone. Though somebody’s probably already done it!

Constraints

• Memory, especially if targeting mobile devices - lots of background images and frame by frame animations = need to be careful with memory usage. Can make use of Phaser’s state system to mitigate this.

• Voice acting? HTML5 sound support is getting much better but could it handle a lengthy game fully voice acted? This is a long way off as I doubt anyone would try this any time soon ;)

Goals

• A flexible enough plugin that it can be used by experienced programmers and novices alike

• Ideally allow for art, writing and coding to be as easy to integrate as possible while remaining separate processes

• Open source, open licensed, go nuts with it

Development Methods

I dunno, get a github started and just do it, we’ll work out how later