Adventure Game Maker

If you scroll down the page and look at the screenshots, you will wonder. Am I at the right place. This doesn't look at all like a new version of the Adventure Game Creator template. That's right. This is a complete rewrite of the template. Everything has been modified. The layout is now horizontal rather than vertical. Forget about the 3D world, we are now back to 2D. The somewhat blunt white background has been replaced by a look and feel that remind you this template is bundled within revMedia, a product of Revolution Ltd.

Okay, let's start the visit. Please follow the guide .

When you open the template, the first thing you see is the start page. The frame on the left hand-side contains some basic introductory information about the Adventure Game creator Template, what it is for, how it works. The frame on the right hand-side contains some basic game metadata.

Click on the folder icon to point the player to the directory where games are already stored or where games are to be stored.

To start a game, you have two options. One is to open a game that already exists. The other one is create a brand new game. Whichever option you choose, the first thing you need to do is use the dropdown button within the section “Select or Create a Game” to select a game. The menu will be automatically populated with all the game that already exist within the folder you specified.

As soon as a game has been selected, the data of the game are automatically loaded. This includes the game data that you see here as well as further data about the scenes, stages, objects, hotspots, interactions within the game (coming to this in a second).

Okay, time to come to something that has some substance and start to look a bit like a game. Click on the button at the bottom right of the start page to go to the page that will let you define the content of the game.

As mentioned, we have completely changed the way the Adventure Game creator works. Rather than have one 3D world split into cubes (with a east, north, west view), we know have the notion of multiple scenes. A scene is simply a location, a place where some some objects and events happen in a given scenery.

This screen is the one where you get to define the different locations where things happen in your game. You can have as many you want. Simply use the buttons “Add Scene” or “Delete Scene” to add or delete a scene. At the bottom, the box “start scene” is used to define the scene that should be loaded when the game is opened within the player.

To select a scene, simply click on it. A light green rectangle will appear around the scene. A button will also show up, with “Modify” written on it. Clicking on it will allow you to edit the details of each scene (title, type of scene, description). Change the details to your taste and when done, simply click on the update button.

Once the basic details have been provided, it is time to edit the content. For this, simply select a scene and click on the button “Edit Selected Scene” at the bottom right of the screen. This will take you to a new screen.

Each scene is made of 4 types of elements.

1. Stage. What we call a “Stage” which corresponds to the background picture. This is the image or the group of images that make up the scenery.
2. Objects. This is anything added within the scene. The advantage of having objects rather than insert them within the background picture via photoshop or any other graphic program is that objects can be moved independently. You can change you mind during game edition. You can eventually run some animation(*) of each object.
3. Hotspots. These are simply areas on the screen that react to user actions. Hotspots are independent of objects and actions/interactions can only be assigned to hotspots; they can't be assigned to objects. If you would like to get an object react to some event, like have a dialog window pop when you click on a book, simply add an hotspots on top of the book.
4. Interactions. An interaction is what happens right after a hotspot has been clicked on. An interaction here is defined as a sequence of actions. An action is something like playing a video or audio file, showing an image, going to another place on the screen or to another screen, opening a card, etc.

The reason there are two panels, one on the left with stage, objects, hotspots and one of the right with interactions is because the former are necessarily scene specific. The later works across all scenes. This way, you can easily define and use interaction several times in the game, within different scenes (this could be something as simple as an icon popping up).

Changing the stage (the background picture) or adding objects is done via the two buttons at the bottom of the screen. We will come to that in a moment. Adding hotspots is done by drawing them directly on the screen. To do this, simply maintain shift pressed and drag a shape with your mouse on the screen.

A stage cannot be deleted. It can only be changed. This is because the stage defines the width of the scene. If you would like a white background as stage, simply import a white image.

To delete an object or hotspot, simply drag the selected object or hotspot above the top or below the bottom of the display area. A dialog box will then appear to ask you to confirm your action.

Screenshots are shown for the screen that let you change the stage. The process is similar if not identical for importing objects within the scene.

The first thing to do is obviously to click on the “Change Stage” button, on the screen with the scene content.

When you open the game for the first time, the import screen will be empty. When you open the page again, it will be filled with the content that you defined the last time you opened that page. This way, you can easily change your mind, try one background image after another.

To fill it, you need to specify some files. To do this, simply drag and drop a bunch of files on the blue arrow. The next two screenshot show you the process.

Once files have been dropped on the blue arrow, they fill in the dropdown menu on the right of the arrow. The first one in the list gets displayed in the viewing area. You can easily move from one image to another via the dropdown menu.

Images can be resized at will, using the scrollbar on the top right of the screen. They can be moved within the viewing area by clicking on the image and dragging it around. Clicking on import will take a screenshot of the image. Only the part that appears within the viewing area will be captured. What counts is the effective size of the viewing area, the one that can be seen by using the scrollbar at the bottom of the image. In case the image is wider than the actual screensize, multiple screenshots are taken and the image will be saved as multipart files.

Interactions appear on the right side of the Scene Content window. They can be added using the “Add interaction” button at the bottom of the screen or they can be deleted using the trash like icon next to them.

As mentioned, interactions are defined as sequences of actions. This exact sequence of actions is defined by clicking on the pencil shaped icon, on the right of a given interaction. A new screen will then open, with the list of actions

The type of action is defined by clicking on the blue arrow, next to the action image. This will pop up a menu with different actions to choose from.

Once an action is selected, the mini-interface that lets you define the action parameters appears. Simply click on the folder icon to define a media file or on the wrench icon to display a specific dialog box.