Adventure Gamers - Forums

Hey, nice to meet everyone. I want to make games! So I’m doing a lot of research to see what systems/engines people suggest using.

I realize I won’t be creating anything large, polished, or at all impressive for a while, since I’m just starting out right now, but I’m still looking ahead to what I want to do.  I’ve taken a look at several point-and-clicks made by beginners like me and there appears to be several options for engines I can use that will have all the basics (Adventure Game Studio, Adventure Creator, Adventure Game Engine, etc.).

One thing I’m curious about though is using some complex dialogue mechanics, so I’m wondering if certain systems are better than others.  Again, I doubt I’ll use most of these ideas for my first game but I’d like to start on the right track and not have to learn a completely different engine down the road.

Here’s what I’m looking to do, concerning dialogue and voices:

—dialogue appears in word balloons (I think this one should be fine, but I’ve mostly only seen text being placed above the speaker’s head in other beginner games so I don’t know if there are weird hoops you have to go through to do that)
—realistic interruptions (no *character stops talking mid sentence…. half second pause…. next character starts talking*)
—multiple dialogues/voices at once (similar to previous- so characters can talk over each other)
—reveal text as voice reaches it (helps with humor, because “nothing ruins a joke more than reading it before hearing it” (can’t remember who said that))
—a “rewind” mechanic to catch missed dialogue (it’s not a point-and-click, but I’m thinking along the lines of Star Control 2 where you can move the play bar backward, to the beginnings of each previous line of dialogue)
—combining the previous two items (this might be complicated- if I rewind to the beginning of a line of dialogue that was an interruption of something else, it might be weird to hear half a second of the previous character’s line)

Phew… I’m not sure how necessary this topic really was to my journey to start my game, but if anyone has any advice I’d appreciate it!  Last note: I’m working on a Mac so if I want to use something like Adventure Game Studio I’ll have to find a port or something.

Hm, not what I was asking for but it’s in the realm of interest. Thanks, Diego!