Quests - Where to Go and What to Do

Quests comprise a notification system in ARIS games. Their use is optional and serves to help the player focus on what they can and should be doing. You should only look to make quests after you have learned the basics of Locks. You will need to configure Locks to make any quest work as it should.

Quests have two active states, Visible and Complete. Each can be separately toggled by the player satisfying their respective locks.

• A visible, incomplete quest shows up—for your players—in the active section of the Quests tab.
• A visible, complete quest shows up—for your players—in the completed section of the Quests tab.
• Invisible quests do not appear to your player, although you can still place locks on objects regarding their completion state.

Complete by Default

By default, each quest is both visible and completed. This is a bit strange and why you need to understand locks before mucking about with Quests. If you're not careful/thorough, you will end up with Quests that only confuse you and your players more. Here's a basic workflow.

1. Create a Quest. Fill in some basic details (image, description text).
2. In the complete section, add a lock that corresponds to what the player needs to do to complete the quest.
3. In the visible section, add a lock that corresponds to what the player needs to do to make the quest begin (begin = when first visible).
4. Decide on a quest notification style and where to send the player—in the ARIS app—when they tap "Begin Quest" (i.e. the Notification Button) (if you use an alert box or if you choose the icon format to display the Quests tab).

Quests cannot be uncompleted. That is if your player completes a quest, and this is used within another lock, that is a one-way action.

Quest Notifications

There are three options for how you can notify a player that a quest has been started or completed:

• None - The player receives no direct notification of the change in status.
• Alert Box - This is a large overlay that takes over the player’s UI. They will see this and must act to dismiss it before moving on. The Alert Box uses a default graphic or the quest’s icon and the description (if the description is long it will be truncated).
• Top Banner - A more subtle notification. A small banner briefly appears at the top of the player’s screen before disappearing.

Notification Button

When the player views a quest's details in the Quests tab, there is an optional button for them at the bottom of the screen (Quest details render similarly to plaques) which is titled "begin quest" by default. Authors can use this button to send the player to another part of the ARIS interface: another tab like the Map, or even kick them out of the game. Another option is to have this button run a script (see ARISjs).

This button's name is a bit misleading; it does not show up on the quest notification itself, only when the player drills down into it via the Quests tab.

Currently, there is a bug where the notification button shows up as "begin quest" when the quest is completed and a more appropriate button would be "complete quest" or something similar.

Quests Tab

The player can see their visible and incomplete (i.e. active) and their visible and completed (i.e. complete) quests in the Quests Tab in the ARIS app. The author has two presentation options to choose from: list (default) and icons.

The List view shows two lists of quest titles (active and complete). Each title can be tapped to reveal Quest Details (title, media, description, and notification button—again, rendered similarly to plaques).

The icon view presents a menu of icons for each quest (the active and complete quests are not distinguished other than which icon is presented—visible icon for visible and incomplete quests and complete icon for visible and complete quests). Each icon can be tapped to reveal Quest Details (title, media, description, and notification button—again, rendered similarly to plaques).

Ignoring Quests—Turn off the Quests tab

The safest bet for newcomers is to ignore quests until you have a good understanding of the other elements of ARIS (objects, triggers, locks). Quests are totally optional. Other than ignoring them as an author, there is one important step to help your players not be constantly bothered and confused by an empty Quests panel:

In the Editor, go to Game > Tabs > Quests > Delete

to remove the Quests tab from your game.