Lightgun Shooter Scripting And Theory

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2 comments, last by Hairein 12 years, 5 months ago
[font="arial, sans-serif"]Hello everyone![/font]
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[font="arial, sans-serif"]I'm looking for information on scripting languages and design information used for creating arcade-type on-the-rails/light-gun shooters such as [/font][font="arial, sans-serif"]Terminator Salvation Arcade ([/font]http://www.youtube.c...h?v=XDanxhZGKOo) [font="arial, sans-serif"]and Time Crisis (2) ([/font]http://www.youtube.c...h?v=jXtL5kS5odo)[font="arial, sans-serif"].[/font]
[font="arial, sans-serif"]Specifically, I'm interested in the editing of the scripts used to design sequences and scripting of the actions at each scene where targets are presented and shoot at the player or other predefined events occur.[/font]
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[font="arial, sans-serif"]-Are there any freely available commercial/non-commercial libraries available for developing those kind of games?[/font]
[font="arial, sans-serif"]-Any websites or specific forums which you could suggest to find out more about this subject?[/font]
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[font="arial, sans-serif"]Greetings.[/font]
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There's nothing in those types of games that can't be implemented with most any engine. Torque, Unity, Unreal, idTech3, etc. Unless you're developing for PS2 hardware or something, there's no point in going homebrew, either.

Otherwise, there's no real community for such a niche market that I'm aware of. Your googl'ing is probably as good as mine.
RIP GameDev.net: launched 2 unusably-broken forum engines in as many years, and now has ceased operating as a forum at all, happy to remain naught but an advertising platform with an attached social media presense, headed by a staff who by their own admission have no idea what their userbase wants or expects.Here's to the good times; shame they exist in the past.
All the reference you need can be taken from those videos. This is mostly a concern of sitting down with paper and designing your engine, script API and gameplay. The scripting system is especially important if you're working with a team, so your teammates don't need to build the entire engine just to test the game - they only need the editor or the engine's runtime.
In case you're having trouble working out the API behind your scripts, try thinking of the most complex scenes you're going to have in your current game design - plan a script system that would make these scenes possible. It's an ongoing process of expanding the codebase and adding functionality.

Regarding a game engine. Define your feature list:
  • Do you want that time-attack, shoot-and-cover based gameplay like the Time Crisis series, or do you want a continuous gameplay like House of the Dead?
  • Destructable environments?
  • Alternate paths?
  • Realistic physics?

You need a very good 'DCC package -> custom game editor' pipeline, because you (or your team) will be handling a lot of paths, actors, helpers\tags, events and animation sequences.
Your game editor needs good navigation controls, placement of props, writing + assigning scripts and proper previewing of gameplay (quintessential for you to be able to tweak your game all the way to polishment, with a lot of iterations).

The player is not able to roam; therefore your levels will always have a few polygons he'll never get to see and this is a perfect opportunity for you to optimize the hell out of your levels with some sort of compiling tool that would exclude this never-seen geometry, while producing your final binary format for release.
Thanks for the replies!

I'm not actually building anything in that direction, I was just investigating the already available technology for that kind of game. The arcade business and its technology seem really very 'closed', and not openly documented or published.

My interest is in seeing examples (screenshots, documents or other related media) which shows the GUI editing environments themselves, as were used on arcade titles. Also, I wanted to find out if any generally known libraries or SDKs were available for that genre.

Regards.

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