For the past 2 years I've been waiting for an easy to use game builder. Last month I urged someone, somewhere (Bill Appleton) to remake a World Builder-like app so that mere mortals around the world could start building games easily. Nobody seemed interested. So I've started a little project...
Heavily influenced by the unreleased engine used by ICOM Simulation, makers of Uninvited, ShadowGate, Deja Vu and Deja Vu 2, this game dev toolkit will allow users to create an adventure game in weeks or months instead of years.
For those unfamiliar with the ICOM games, the games were composed of rooms populated with interactive objects. Some items wouldn't budge, some would. Some fit in your inventory, some wouldn't. Some were light enough to carry, others too heavy. Items that could be moved could be dragged into the character's inventory (if it wasn't too big or too heavy,) manipulated, some objects were containers and could be opened. Object to object interaction existed...object to self interactions also...self to object...(uh...no self to self though...heh, family game.
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A window would show you the room graphically...another window would describe the room textually...there was an inventory window, an 'actions' window, and an exit window.
The exit window would represent each exits with a square, corresponding with the point-of-view of the graphical representation of the room.
Back in the days, the interface was really nifty because it was Mac-like...double-click to open doors, double-click the opened door to move to the next room...double-click to open 'container objects'...drag and drop objects into the inventory.
Today, this might not be so amazing but I think I can improve the interface a bit more.
I don't know if I'll have much time to work on this when school starts or if I'll ever finish it but I've been working on some parts of the creator and a bit on the interpreter.
It's starting to look like the mockups I've made but still not there yet.
Here are 2 mockups of what the some of the interface will eventually look like:
World View (where you create new 'room' objects and link them together via exits set from inside the Room Editor):
Object Editor (the inspector window that allows you to set object properties):
When I first thought of making this app, I thought to include vector drawing tools like World Builder did back in the days...but it would be too complicated for me at the moment and figured people could just use a drawing program and export their art to .png.
If I ever release this, vector tools from within the program won't come until the version after the release.
Comments? Suggestions?
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