Here we go!
Dawn of the Ronin [PC] - built using FNA (an open-source cross-platform implementation of Microsoft XNA)
Dawn of the Ronin places you in control of an unnamed Ronin warrior right in the heart of 16th Century Japan. Your only companion cut down by Tokugawa's soldiers, you become one of the thousands of warriors that Toyotomi calls to defend Osaka, and to stand against the Tokugawa regime.So it's a side-scrolling action game based around the idea of hubs and encounters. As you progress through the game, you'll be based around various central locations called hubs where you will be presented with a list of encounters. Selecting an encounter will begin the encounter and take you to the levels where you will fight, explore and interact with other characters. Completing encounters will unlock further encounters and progress the storyline. Optional side-missions will also appear at various points.
In order to construct this, Articy:Draft has been used to populate the various hubs with encounters. Here are a few images showing this setup:
- The overall story progression
- Articy_Flow_0.jpg (207.6 KiB) Viewed 31078 times
- Articy_Flow.jpg (228.11 KiB) Viewed 31078 times
As you can see here, there are a few custom flow elements.
Summary - These are used to populate screens in the game that have a text summary, used at various points to summarize the back-story, events happening off-screen etc between chapters.
Shortcut - These are used to generate debug starting points in the game engine.
Map Hub - This is used to denote when the map hub should be shown. The engine then looks forward from this element at all the valid encounters after this point and displays them to the user in a lovely animated menu! (
https://twitter.com/RisingSunGames/status/829783298398355461)
Encounters - The meat of the game, and encounter is a cutscene, a level to kill things, or a place to explore. Completing encounters progresses the story.
Encounters have a custom template that allows me to set up everything needed from inside Articy:Draft, from unlocking achievements, to audio effects on completion, to the map file to load and the corresponding Lua script.
- Articy_Flow_EncounterProps.jpg (235.98 KiB) Viewed 31078 times
There is also a dialogue system that is driven by Articy:Draft (no pictures!) which has branching paths similar to Mass Effect's dialogue wheels with investigative branches. This is all driven from using Articy:Draft Dialogues, conditions and instructions.
The only tricky part I encountered while implementing Articy was to parse the JSON into my own articy data object model, and to parse out the Instruction commands. I found a neat library that can execute C# code at run-time with a given context, so all my engine does is run the instruction fragments through the library and it will set flags and other variables in my engine without any hassle!
Some other animated gifs and images!
https://twitter.com/RisingSunGames/status/773609860244049921 (gif)
https://twitter.com/RisingSunGames/status/777134031376965633 (gif)
https://twitter.com/RisingSunGames/status/844298094149799936 (gif)
https://twitter.com/RisingSunGames/status/821450396707254273 (img)
https://twitter.com/RisingSunGames/status/821099729853513728 (img)
Big images below!
- C8G_G9FWsAESVx8.jpg (135.76 KiB) Viewed 31078 times
- C5gdjznWcAIvcfY.jpg (75.98 KiB) Viewed 31078 times