Creating a Questsystem for my Game

The Greenbox System

How to best implement Quests seems to attract quite a few questions among

(new) game developers (see links below) and a good Quest system probably requires a lot of thought even from experienced game developers. Obviously, the quest system you choose strongly depends on the type of game you want to implement.

I will not talk about using an existing quest system that ships with an engine or hard-coding individual quests in this blog post. Instead, I like to describe my self-made approach towards a quest system which reads the data for each quest from an external resource. I will give code examples which hopefully can inspire other game developers facing similar issues.

What is "Tales - Told & Untold"

A World of Plenty

The 2.5D game world of Tales - Told & Untold
is hand-painted, non-repetitive and full of details.

Many games provide a big game world. In GTA you can freely move through a whole city or even a whole state. In Skyrim a whole continent is freely accessible. In Doom & Destiny, the worldmap is huge. But often a huge game world means an empty game world. In the older parts of the GTA series, you couldn't access most houses. In Doom & Destiny (which is - by the way - a great game), only a few cities and dungeons are spread across a huge world map.

Skyrim does a good job at populating the world, but sometimes you will encounter the same interchangeable event at different places or you will enter a dungeon that looks almost like the one you explored before. The reason for this is simple: content, especially good content, is expensive.

But the real world is different. There are no vast areas that are almost empty. The world is full of people, each of which is different. The wonders of nature are many and at every corner there is a story to discover, if you have time to explore it. That is what I want my game "Tales - Told  Untold" to be like.

Tilemaps with invisible collision layer in Phaser

Phaser, Tiled and Physics

While there are several TileMap tutorials for Phaser out there, I didn't find any using Phaser 2.3 with the P2 physics. For this reason I decided to write my own tutorial about. Phaser is a cool javascript library that for turning a HTML5 canvas elements into games.

Goal

Our goal in this tutorial is to use the program Tiled to create a map for our game. We will have a separate layer for collision data. In phaser we will display the background and foreground layer, but use the invisible collision layer for collision. We will use P2 physics, as some comments suggest that this physic works best with tilemaps.

How "Tales - Told & Untold" was born

From Pen&Paper to Boardgames to a Computer Game

“You cannot play with us, because we have already played 10 sessions of this game.”

“Tales, Told & Untold” - now a Computergame in developement - started as a game with dice, cards and boards.

 When I was a child, I went camping in Greece with around 40 school mates. Four boys from a higher grade were playing Dungeons and Dragons, but when I asked them to play with them, they said, this wasn't possible. I thought “What a stupid game, where people cannot join at the start of a new game session.”

So I decided to create a role playing game that was easy to learn and where people could join easily - and I failed miserably.

The game I created worked well - I played it with friends for 20 sessions over several years - but it was impossible for other players to join later. The rules were - in my honest opinion - easier than most pen& paper RPGs' rules, but my friends couldn't play the game without of me, because the rules were very complicated and because I never wrote them down.

My game - only called “Fantasy Game”, was different to classical pen&paper RPGs: