NPC Scripts

Feb 28, 2022

Enemy design is delightful, but it's better if I come up with a story first... did you know writing is hard? I literally have to learn everything when it comes to this and it's nuts that some of it was actually taught in school but I didn't listen.

NPC

How much is an NPC supposed to be capable of? I know some suggest giving them the player's capabilities, but does that help when they exist mostly for narrative rather than aiding core gameplay? I feel like mine are lacklustre... but maybe I just need more animations lol.

Does anyone have any thoughts on the matter?

(Article) Dialogue Box with Simple SFX and Parsing for Pauses

This is a tutorial for Godot 3 I used to make part of my dialogue manager. It gives me animal crossing like SFX and the ability to have short pauses.

(Video) Loading JSON files for Dialogue

This is another tutorial for Godot 3 that comprises the other bit of my system. I cobbled together a few more features using my poor understanding of the documentation. I believe the author of this video has a more advanced JSON dialogue setup that might fit what you're looking for.

My system boils down to a state machine where each line in a dialogue is a unique state. The JSON file signifies all the states in a scene and alongside what should be said I can define other things I want to happen when a line is played, The most I've done with this is change an emote image or display additional text but I plan to base my cutscenes around it too. But instead of changing an image I might call for the camera to move, the game to fade to black, or for an NPC or Some other game object to play an animation. It's a bit messy right now but I've come to realize a lot of game programming is just a state machine in different contexts.

I wouldn't be scared of making a brute-force attempt either. Iterating is part of the creative process and even if it ends in failure you'll learn something new even if that's how not to do something.

Anyone know any good tutorials on creating dialogue/cutscene systems for RPGs? Preferably Godot but if there’s other ones with easily applicable universal principles that would work too. This is something that I feel like has lots of different approaches and I wouldn’t want to just brute force a really cluttered system for it.

Jul 10, 2021

yea that's right, I made the trees move

Inventory UI

Slowly putting it together... It's just undergoing a few hiccups, totally not bugs arising from my janky programming skills

Options Menu

The coolest thing this menu has is keybinding. I need to tweak it a bit so that the user has to specify that they want to apply changes rather than instantly updating the game settings

Discord Rich Presence...

was this necessary to add right now, no was this easy to add and another means of attaining validation and visible progress... yes

Level Transition

It's really fast but it might be due to how empty these testing levels are and not how well I coded it lol. I sorta want to edit the shader I'm using to do a radial wipe but glsl is the enemy of mankind.

Busting

Don't mind me, just bustin' up some crates.

Level Switching

Super important feature since I can't put the whole game in one scene without gigabrain code turning things off and on as needed. It also lets me teleport the player within a scene which is nice