Note: This template is designed for AGS 3.5.0
ActionWheel is an open source game template for Adventure Game Studio. The goal of this design project is three things:
- Visual Simplicity - in point-and-click adventure games, it's sometimes easy to end up in a situation where the game UI elements take up way too much space. Worse yet, sometimes there's a significant amount of distance between the thing you want to click (a verb icon, like "Use") and a the thing you need to click afterwards (an object, like a lever)
ActionWheel attempts to solve this problem by putting everything you need in one place, at the shortest possible distance from where you clicked. The idea is similar to VerbCoin by LucasArts, which was used in some of their most popular games. However, the design is also highly influenced by the Sierra Creative Interpreter, courtesy of Sierra On-Line. My design intention was to put both systems together into something new.
- Context-Driven Indication - ActionWheel uses several different kinds of labels to indicate to players certain kinds of context:
- Cursor Label - A hovering label next to the mouse pointer appears when all interfaces are closed, showing Characters, Hotspots, and Objects in a given room. This easily shows to players what things in an environment can be interacted with.
- Wheel Label - The Wheel Label clearly explains the buttons on the wheel. Additionally, the label will contextually update for certain kinds of properties - for example, the "Use" icon can change to "Pick Up" or "Touch" to indicate what kind of action is available for that button.
- Inventory Label - Finally, the inventory window shows what icon is currently under the mouse.
- Integration of Elements - ActionWheel aims to design a new kind of point-and-click interface that incorporates traditional pop-up windows into a stationary cursor area, based on where the player clicks. Similar to the first principle, the intention is to keep the most important, most-accessed functions within immediate reach for the player. In addition, this particular design is intended to be friendly to both traditional desktop inputs, as well as mobile tablets.
A very basic demo game has been put together with a 1.0 release of the GUI's functions. Although the code is a little ugly and a little hacky, it works well enough to release as a template.
There are a few future goals that I want to explore for the project:
- Custom Dialog Rendering - I'd love to figure out how to incorporate custom dialog buttons with icons into the UI. This is somewhat harder, and requires the use of dynamic sprites, but it's 100% possible that speech options could also be factored into the UI somehow.
- Tablet Optimization - I have a few ideas on how AGS might be optimized for touch interfaces, and want to experiment with them in the near future. The biggest two things are: representing touch inputs to an engine designed around mouse clicks, and visually showing to players exactly where fingers are positioned using the AGS Camera API.
There are two basic ways to get up and running:
- Git clone this repo and open up the demo game
- Git clone this repo, and instead put the
actionwheel.agtfile in the folder where your AGS Editor lives.