Embedded Files
Setting
The bases of the game is that you are a traveling law man in a high magic world. Think of Judge Dread in a sword and sorcery world.
The local Baron is facing stiff competition to his mining and weapons manufacture. His rival has developed a nonmagical way to smelt the star metal and forge the weapons. Without the need for the baron's powerful fire magics the Barron is facing the possibility of losing his monopoly.
Riding on this base of tension between them is the upcoming wedding between one of the Baron's children and a top performing sales man from the Baron's weapon business. The fiancee is murdered and the initial evidence points to the Barron as being the murder, as the death appears to have been caused by the Barons magic.
The Barron professes innocence and blames his rival, further enflaming tensions between the miners that support each.
The story is an old one, two con [wo]men decide to steal a fortune in weapons from the barron. One becomes the fiancee of one the Barron's children and the other becomes that child's close friend. The two con persons fake numerous weapon orders and deliveries and stockpiling the weapons for sale on the black market. The Barron thinks the fiancee is one of his top sales person as they have secured many weapons contracts and deposits for delivery. The weapons are secretly hidden in a warehouse in town while the bills are pending. The barron distracted by the upcoming wedding isn't watching the books and doesn't notice the irregularities.
The plan was for the con persons to slip away before the con is discovered and before the wedding. The problem comes when one of the con people actually falls in love with the Barron's child and wants to call off the con. This leads to their partner murdering them, and trying to pin the murder on the Barron. Then with the Barron's child the legal heir, and there best friend to help them steer them. The con could still succeed, the wrinkle in this plan comes when the player shows up to aid in the investigation. Now it is a race between the player to discover the plot and murder, and the remaining con man to complete the plan and escape with a fortune in weapons.
The valley of Starhaven
The valley of Starhaven is deep in the shattered mountains the remnants of a ancient meteorite impact. The metal in the mountains is able to be forged into powerful magical weapons, but require equally powerful magics to smelt and forge the weapons.
At the top of the valley sits the Barons castle, surrounded by a diverted mountain stream which forms the moat. To the west is the militia barracks and headquarters.
The heart of the town lies south of the guard barracks and surrounds the Stone Cutters Arms. The local Tavern/ Inn. South of the Barron's castle is the closes, these multi story houses are defined by narrow streets and squalor conditions. At the heart is the Souq or open air market, this area is were the miners and works live.
Further to the south on the west side of the river is the Barron's mines and smelting furnaces. Across the river from here is a small offshoot valley is the site of the Barron's main rival's mines and smelters.
Further to the south on the west side of the rivers is the warehouse district this is where trade caravans come to trade goods for weapons, and were several weapons manufactures produce the actual weapons for the star metal.
Game Play
The child is chosen at ransom on game start and the murder site is chosen from a selection of sites. The random selection of one of the Barron's four children then necessitates the gender of the fiancee, which defines the gender of the accomplice. The gender of the accomplice determines the gender of the accountant whom the accomplice is sleeping with.
Once the player enters the game this has been defined and saved. The guard at the entrance of the valley will direct the player to the murder site and the destination can also be seen on the overview map.
Quest
The player is lead along via a set of clues. As each clue is uncovered an item appears on the case desk in the guard HQ. The player can return to the guard barracks at any point and examine all the clues discovered to date.
In the diagram to the right is the quest flow, this initially became the base material were we laid out all the props and NPC for the quests. Key NPC's were created as prefabs to be placed into the world map. This quest development level allowed us to play through the quest without having to spend time running the entire world. It also allowed for simultaneous independent development of quest props and world layout.
In the flow chart the main quest line follows the blue line, some points there are multiple ways to get to the next quest point. When the blue line diverges it indicates that the following clues can be gathered in any order but all must occur to advance t the next step.
Yellow lines show choices that the player can make that affect the story further along the quest path. For example at one point the player has the option to sweet talk the accountant out of a copy of the accounts, alternately you can threaten or bribe the accountant. If you ask nicely then he gives you the accounts, but they are encrypted and he doesn't have the key. This leads to the player making a glass of seeing to magically decode the accounts. This mini game involves doing helpful tasks to buy the materials. If you threaten the accountant then he tells you he lost the code book. This leads to the mini game of either buying the materials to make a fishing pole to fish the code book out of the sewer, or helping the shepard find sick sheep and he gives you his old fishing pole. If you threaten him, he will decode them but will meet you at the tavern at night to given them over.
When all the clues are assembled there is the big reveal in the town square where you confront all the participants and layout your case. then pass judgment. If you pronounce a sentence that is against the laws of the Empire you lose the game. The laws are learned from dialog along the way, also if you accuse the wrong person you lose.
Art
It is amazing what you can do with a small amount of money for art assets and free asset sites. We purchased a skybox system that allowed for the day-night cycle. Then wrote a component to interface with this components to turn lights on and off and change light maps on buildings. This allowed for the scene to change as the day progressed.
Another addon we got was a component for putting holes in the terrain, this allowed for the mines to be built but placing two layers of terrain and making the top one have a two sided shader.
A few other assets were assets I had bought for other projects and ElderWrath prototyping. I ended up writing a cheap and dirty occlusion system to hide the underground components when not visible. This was done with a set of colliders tied to a controller for what was hidden.
Results
The project was a success and we achieved our major mile stones. We had a playable game with dynamic plot and characters. There was no major defects in the demoed version. Final grade on the entire project was in the high 90's with individual variations based on individual members contributions.
Background / Team
Starhaven was conceived as a RPG for the CMPT-330 Game Design course at Grant MacEwan University. The team consisted of Justyn Huculak, Winston Kouch, Ian Nalbach and myself.
The programming was split equally between us along with the writing and level design.
Ian handled the sqlLite3 integration and then laid out the quest plot and made prefabs for all the characters. He also codes the scene transition code that allowed the activation of door and other objects to transition between interior scenes and exterior.
I wrote the dialog system and Time Of Day (TOD) integration. I handled the modeling of the forges and the layout of the outdoor areas.
Winston did a lot of the editing pass on the dialog, and set up the close and souq areas.
Justyn wrote dialog and did the UI and mini map coding along with the town site.
The main outdoor area was built using L3DT which is a terrain generator package that I own. From this base terrain, higher resolution textures, trees, vegetation were painted onto it using Unity built in tools.
Using a package called Super Splines the river and mine carts were animated and laid out to form the river. Ian and Winstone then wrote a pawn control system based on my description of the one built for Mass Effect. This allowed for pawns to walk and do jobs at various waypoints. This also allowed for the triggering of Barks from the Dialog system. A bark is a dialog which has only NPC nodes on the root. A random one is selected and displayed as a speech bubble.
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse