Hi there everyone I've been working on an adventure game in XNA it's a lot like a Japanese dating sim style adventure game (I haven't started the story yet but there will most likely be no naked ladies or sex scenes in this game) Here is an example screen shot of a game of that genre. http://img179.imageshack.us/img179/5013/divideadexamplescreenog0.jpg My game is set up in a way that is close to this, I made a word wrapper for my text box area and the scene is set up and changed very easily. Now the next thing that I am thinking about setting up is loading blocks of text to be displayed on screen (The wrapper automatically sorts them into paragraphs and lines) and conversation options / movement options. Now the idea I had in my head would be to have two first in first out stacks for each room. The first stack contains a number of file locations for lua files (or maybe another kind of file I haven't got lua set in stone yet) This stack will get popped as the story goes along. For example when someone leaves a room the stack will be popped and a different lua will be be loaded when entering that room. The second stack is where the lua files contents will be read into. Things like conversational text and menu options can be read in from the lua file and popped off as needed. Now there are a few problems that I can see in doing it this way and I was hoping someone else might have a better idea of how to handle this kind of thing. This is the last main core mechanic I need to get set up before I can properly start making this game (and look for an artist and a writer to help me out) but I don't want to rush into things and ruin development because I am excited about getting started properly. Also I need to think of a way of easily creating branching stories in this kind of game. Anyway any ideas at all in this area will be much appreciated.

I want to create my own game fully I don't want to use the RPG starter kit. XML would be easier to create characters? How so I have used XML before many times and I don't really know how that would be easier. I don't really need to create "Characters" I just need text to come up on the screen eg.

"Dave: Hello"

In Lua I can call things like a screen fade in and fade out functions from within the tables as well.

XML would probably work yes but I don't think it is as useful for my needs as LUA and it would be exactly the same set up having different XML files instead of LUA files.

Does anyone else have some advice of how to set this up?

No worries I wasn't trying to shout at you or anything it just sounded like you hadn't properly read my first post. The game I showed a screen shot of is called "Divi-Dead" (Contains nudity) if you look that up you will see the kind of thing I mean. I am not making a dating sim game here but rather an adventure game that uses the same style interface as a dating sim game. However not the type of dating game that in generally on newgrounds I would highly suggest looking up the game Divi-Dead and giving it a go to see the differences. This would also show you the problem that I was asking about in the first post in a different context as the way that the dating sims you are talking about work are very different.

Looks like no one has any other ideas so I might start coding it up tonight I was hoping in the end to allow for people to create their own games using the lua script and their own images so I hope this goes well.