In Nano, Events are the primary way the player interacts with the game world. Events are also the most direct way the player learns about the environment they are taking part in, meaning Events play double duty by providing game play and story elements. While the story is something that will develop overtime, the functionality of Events is something that the game needs right away. Events are also the feature that I wrestled with the most when trying to come up with a solid development design.
It was clear what Events had to be, they were to display some story text to the player, a few buttons with text on them representing the player’s available choices, and upon selecting a choice a result is shown that also has story text as well as displaying any rewards the player is given. Think of the event system in games like FTL. This type of system is generally referred to as a dialog tree, decision tree, or most specifically a simple directed graph. There are many plugins for Unity that provide varying levels of decision tree functionality, but I wanted to take a stab at rolling my own first.
So far a very simple Event model is in place along with Choices and Results. When a player enters a new location an Event is chosen from the list of possible Events which is then displayed on screen. To manage the Event’s display is the Event UI Controller class which is attached to prefab in Unity. This Event prefab uses Unity’s new UI features to display text and buttons. This is my first attempt at working with this new UI system, before this all objects displaying text used Text Mesh components which I find to be clunky and lacking a lot of features that are needed for displaying even a modest amount of text.
There is still a lot to be done to get Events fully functional. The player still needs to be able to select one of the choices and be presented with the result. Events will also be the primary way that combat is triggered. Some choices should only be available to the player if certain conditions are met, like having a particular item equipped. There is also the daunting task of creating a large amount of Events all with multiple choices which in turn have a variety of rewards.
