Tutorial Step 5 – Define the game’s plot

For simplicity, while defining this tutorial game’s plot I will be trying to reuse existing graphics.

Normally, I’d recommend the other approach: produce graphics to suit your own story, not the converse.

However, here is our games’ story:

  • The player starts playing from the park.
  • The goal of the game is to open a secret box
  • The box
  • Plus, the bungalow’s room can be accessed only from the bungalow’s front door  which will be locked at the game start.
  • There is a key  capable to unlock the front door .
    It can be found in the park or in front of the bungalow.
  • Unfortunately, there are other two keys  perfectly identical around, so the player has to do some trial-and-error in order to see which one is really working on the door.
  • In the park there is a computer-controlled character, the
    surfer
    , which owns the scissors . He will give them to you if you give him any key .

This is obviously a simple example, but you may invent more complicated plots.

More grahics

Any game can be written even without any images, in a sort of text-only fashion. You can choose to use only icons, or icons and full size images to be displayed when the player looks at the objects.

In this tutorial I chose to use both icons and pictures for scissors and keys, while for the surfer and the box I decided to display the full picture directly on the scene picture. In the future, you will be free to decide.

Now, let’s grab the graphics for the above mentioned game objects. Grabbing from the table below and save them in your testland folder (you should be an expert at this point!).

All the necessary items and characters:

Item or
character
Icon Image
The surfer not needed
A box not needed
The scissors
Three (identical) keys

 

Note: Actually, there are other icons which the system uses for the user interface. These are related to the client’s skin, which is not covered by this tutorial.

So, you need nothing else than proceeding to the next step.

 

Tutorial Step 6 - Lock the door
Tutorial Step 4 - Add the links between rooms

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