Brought to you by Parnassian Studios (you can find our website here).
We just managed to finish our first commercial product, a development tool / xml writer, while putting together our first game. It's something that we use to create and manage scripted scenes in the game, and we're calling it the GameEvent Sequencer.
The program is a bit difficult to explain. Using the Event Queue decoupling pattern and trying to find the best type-safe event management system for our game type (an RPG with an abnormally large amount of "scripted scenes"), we looked around for available programs that would allow us to have our scriptwriter make the scenes directly, or at least all of the dialogue interactions, with no coding necessary and with a sort of forced-internal-consistency (to minimize human error). We couldn't really find anything that fit our needs, at least for less than a hundred dollars- a system that allows us to recreate each event type's data structure and then use that setup like a factory to string together events into meaningful event queues (sequences). So we took a couple of months and built one ourselves!
The link to the program's description page, and the youtube videos you find there, will offer a better explanation than I can in text for what this program is supposed to do and how it does it, but essentially it's just an XML writer with a sort of logic-shell. You can use the program to create complicated data structures (essentially classes filled with whatever data types you want, with each piece of data named whatever you want, and arranged visually how you want- we call these "prototypes"), then pass the program off to your scriptwriter who can string those structures together in sequences, fill them with data, and export it all to XML. All you'd have to do is write an XML Parser to get the data into the game and, if you're using an Event Queue pattern for your scripted scenes like we are, you should be able to get the data plugged in pretty easily. The usefulness of this program is tied very closely with how your game's event management system is built though.
We've made both a demo version and a full version. The demo is the same as the normal version but as an executable-only and missing the Load functionality. The full version, just $10, includes the source files (C# in Visual Studio 2013) to make modifications easier if you require data types that we haven't included, or to export to some other format than XML. Both are available on our website, but I've also attached the demo version as an attachment here (and it's on the Marketplace as well).
I'm finding it very difficult to find places where such a tool might be noticed by the people it would interest, and I basically solo'd this entire project, so I'd really welcome any input that everyone has on program improvements, places where it might get noticed, your thoughts on how easy/difficult it is to figure out what the thing is even for, etc! Thank you.
