Ideally a game engine should load levels from a file and run them. So in all engines there is the ability to write complicated scripting.

Dave

Quote:Original post by YengaMatiC
Hi, i'm designing an action/adventure short game for learning purposes (my objectives are completing a project and learning some game-engine integration experience).
How long should the story be? I want the game last a few hours (like adventure games for kids). Do i have to take into account the story script for designing the engine or only thinking of some scenarios and analising some use cases?
How do you implement that script in the game? I thought of an event graph (parent events necesary for a child event to happen) that activates nodes with triggers or something.

Thanks.

You have to consider how the player will interact with the game -- what actions they can take and what effects. The engine mechanism will gave to support those. The storyline would be a graph of situation contexts with transitions (driven by player actions and external factors). Look into Finite State Machines (FSM).

Length of a test game isnt that crtical as long as you touch on all the different aspects/elements that would make up the desired game (which could be scaled up later).

To eat up a few hours, you either have to run the player thru quite a numbers of low interactive detail locations or have fewer more detailed situations with enough puzzles/activities to eat up the time without boredome setting in.