Hello, I'm still working on this game thing! It's definitely not an engine; I'm fairly convinced that a game engine is not something I want for myself or to provide for other people, especially after reading this article (ᔥ Casey). The goal, I think, for my future non-trivial projects and theoretically for anyone else with whom this resonates, is to copy the code I've written and start a new project from there, altering things where they ought to work differently or adding new functionality directly to their copy of the codebase. That being said, you can play with my trivial demo here and/or read the Ink file that powers the logic. You can see examples in there of conditional text and triggers of animations, which can affect the geometry of the world, which can alter collision, which means that correctly answering an NPC's question can cause a gate to lift, or whatever. It's got everything you need for a game!
As I figured out in real time in last week's blog, I simplified the collision so that you don't need to do any funny tricks to make the walkable area visible from the sky. If the character's about to walk to a position with possible walkable areas at different heights, it checks them all to see if one actually works. It makes level design more intuitive—just block out some shapes and the character will be able to walk on them. This inspired the working title for this tool: Dollhouse.
Also new since the last update: I realized the interact- prefix was superfluous. Name your stuff in Blender however you want, use those same names in your Ink file, and the tool will recognize that they match and link them together. Again, more intuitive, I think. You can build a little world and decide later how it'll move around. The extra toaster joke is based on my friend's reaction to trying the demo and was something I added right before publishing this very blog post you're reading right now.
Shout out to Casey again for giving me some homework in the form of a Steam Gift: I played The Haunted Island, a Frog Detective Game this week and am looking forward to playing the other two installments in the Frog Detective series very soon. I also finally played through A Short Hike. Both absolutely great, both pretty different from each other and with some notable differences from a Dollhouse-type game (one is first person, the other has jumping), but both also very inspirational for the kinds of things I want to explore, especially related to visual styles. This style of cute one-sitting experience is what Dollhouse is (will be) (should be) all about.
Also on Tuesday I went to Disneyland. I had a fantastically excellent time. There is a new animatronic in an early scene of Pirates of the Caribbean that is technically very well done but utterly wrecks the vibe of the scene that it's in! You can see a good demo of it in this official Imagineering announcement which so blatantly credits Unreal Engine and their "ongoing partnership with Epic Games" that the whole project feels like some kind of contractual obligation to me. Suspicious. Even with this little detraction (and the four or five Johnny Depp-shaped detractions throughout the rest of the ride), Pirates is one of my favorite works of art ever made and I rode it twice and I was so happy to be back in that damn boat. I took two photos during my visit:
These are both just views upward in different parts of the New Orleans Square area of Disneyland. I took similarly skyward photos in the New Orleans area of Tokyo Disneyland. I love layered architecture. There is a direct correlation, if you can believe it, between my desire to take these photos and my desire to develop Dollhouse.