It’s been a week and change since GSoC started. When we left off, I’d just finished implementing pathfinding. In the week since then, I’ve been busy implementing the action system, which is central to any adventure game.

The action menu and inventory

First thing’s first: we need to be able to select our actions.

This game’s interface is… questionable. You click on a body part to select your action, ie. clicking on the mouth selects the “speak” action. It may look cool and all, but the selection areas are just a bit too small. I also really dislike how the game is constantly warping the mouse around - I never have any idea where it will be after closing a menu… but alas, my job is to recreate the game faithfully, not to change the things I deem clunky.

The inventory was the next logical target. By this point, I had also figured out hotspot detection; I started to get a good grasp on how the game handles interaction between objects.

Inventory items were also a good test subject for implementing the “look” action.

Room-specific code

With the interaction system just about figured out at this point, it was time to look at room-specific code. This is what makes the missions tick; each room has a series of “event hooks” that may run when the room is first entered, when a certain amount of time passes, or when you try to vandalize a sign with a phaser.

Rewriting this will easily be the most time-consuming part of the project, and I suspect that future progress updates won’t be much more than “I finished rewriting these rooms, check it out”.

That being said, I finished rewriting the first room, check it out.

If all goes well, maybe the first mission will be completable by next week’s blog post. Here’s hoping.