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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

Image of 4 Classic Adventure Games

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