While I want more than just collection quests in the game. I feel those are the kinds that create a small story and a bigger purpose for the player to go out and do them. At least more so than you usually go out and kill 10 rats than come back for a reward. How many rat kill quests have you done in your lifetime? Far, far too many.
One of the biggest things the player needs to go out and do is acquire a weapon. For that, a simple quest telling the player that a weapon was lost that happens to be nearby. I know what you are thinking. That NPC must be blind not seeing it’s just a few steps away.
The more complex thing will be the player working out to equip items than it is doing the first quest. I may or may not be adding to the quest finish dialog on how to do so. As a gamer, it did not take me long to work out how.
For most people, I don’t think they will realize they have to press escape, click on the character doll respecting the player, click on the word weapon, then click on the knife you just picked up, then hit enter to equip the knife. This game engine is a bit older and I love that old vibe feeling it has. Something younger gamers might not enjoy so much or pick up how to do things right away.
I found out the hard way when testing my first scripts that I was not paying enough attention to the order of operations. As a result the string of quests I have jumped around. Parts of needed information were skipped over while things that the player did not need to know yet were displayed --oops.
You can even make a quest repeatable or not by changing the if persistent is true or not. A rather nice feature if you want to make something repeatable or not. I have even noticed there are some timer events you can select in the expanded events menu. This makes me hopeful it won’t be that hard to add some things I want for the end game later on.
As far as my script there is four main objectives in it. Have the player acquire a weapon. Have the player go off and find armor in a local dungeon. Have the player go off and find another collection NPC on the map Finally, tell the player to move onto another area for more quests.
After a couple of bugs and some fixes in the way, I was doing things I got everything mostly working on the first map of the game as I like. I still need to mess around with something like global variables that is something I’m going to tackle another day.
They could have also already have found the quest if that was a possibility. I recall in quite a few games I’d just ignore NPCs and quests altogether and go off on my adventure. I could set up triggers in the starting area to try and force the player to talk to the NPC and acquire a weapon. I however don’t like forcing the player like that. If they want to go out and get killed with nothing to defend themselves by all means.
The player returning and not finishing a quest can be an opportunity for the game developer. You could include further context clues like I have that you are not just looking for a weapon but a knife is somewhere around here. You could also have some fun at the player's experience of their failure but I won’t get into spoiling that with something I’ll be working on later.
While you can set up an NPC to remove an item such as what you sent them out to find. Since I wanted the player to have a piece of gear before moving on I let them keep it. I also give them a little bit of experience.
I’m also not stopping the player from must skipping over the first part and finding the next NPC and talking with them. You can’t always expect the player do things in the order you want. Not to mention it’s always quite annoying finding an NPC in the wild and finding out you have to go do something else first just to get a quest from them.
Thankfully since this NPC is just dealing with a single quest I got to use the premade templet mostly as-is. I just had to change some text and variables.
Once everything is done you are told to head back to the first NPC you spoke with who tells you to go find a town. Both the main town and some other towns are a couple of maps away. Both will have a few quests in the future created for the player to do.
While there is the third dungeon on the first map and nothing is stopping the player from attempting it. There is no quest on the first map to run it. It will be a bit harder than the surrounding area.
Not everything will always be easy or possible to clear your first time exploring a map in the game I’m making. Sometimes exploring with no reason is rewarded and other times it’s punished. Something I rather enjoy in games so naturally, would be in one I’m working on.
After playing around with scripting I found a rather cool feature that I like that 001 Game Creator has for it. You can generate a URL link to the script you are working on. This makes it easy to share with others the script you are working on.
Now with this done I just have 9 other main maps and their dungeons to set up questing for. I don’t want all of them to just be collect quests either so I have some more researching and learning to do. At least for the collection quests, they should be easier to set up after doing it a couple of times now.
Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar. Screenshots are from 001 Game Creator.
