GID 23 took place a few weeks ago on the 11th/12th of August.

It all began at approximately 11:01.34pm Saturday night, with nearly half of GID#23 already gone and yet I still had no idea what to do.

Tom suggested I team up with him. We had no idea what the game was going to be about only that it had to involve Tea. A large part of the core code was already in place from previous GID’s Tom had done, which left us free to concentrate on more game specific issues.

The result by the end of Sunday was larger than expected and shows clear signs of the games and tv show we drew inspiration from; Monkey Island, Dizzy and Open All Hours.

I finally got around to playing Treasure Island Dizzy the other night, which I used to have for the C128 (or was it the Amiga, I forget which). It’s strange going back and playing games which I played many years ago. Some games I remember as amazing, and yet on playing them again all the fond memories of how good the game was, which you’ve over the years raised onto a pedestal of “how games should be”, comes crashing down as you suddenly realize you’ve built the game up to be more than it really was. Fortunately that isn’t the case with Dizzy nor Monkey Island (which I’m also part way through replaying)

I had forgotten just how HARD older games really are. Most games these days you can pickup and play for some time before you die, try playing Dizzy for more than a minute without dieing several times!

The GID did highlight a few areas of the Engine which could do with improvements, which has resulted in a complete overhaul of the dialogue system to now use a node based tree structure. This enables dialogue to be constructed through a parent/child relationship of dialogue and dialogueItem nodes.

Special purpose nodes can also be inserted into the tree allowing actions to be performed on the display of specific dialogue or the selection of a dialogue option. New node types will be added in the future to support a variety of actions, for example, enabling a quest, playing an animation or transitioning the camera. A general purpose callback node functions as a stop gap until new node types are available.

The Quest system has also seen a significant improvement along with the addition of an NPC Editor

Download the Brew Isles Prototype