Hello everyone, hope you´re all well.
I was trying to come up with ideas to develop a project that would recreate a fighting fantasy game book which was part of my childhood back in the 80´s and 90´s.
The basic concept is that the player (warrior) would have a mission of some sort and would need to travel around the game world, and in the process investigate places, talk to people, pick/drop/trade objects, choose routes, etc, so that it could complete the mission, which would normally involve killing someone or retrieving some important object.
It would also have initial stats like skill, strength, luck and some sort of equipment to fight the enemies it encounters.
But i don´t know if it´s actually feasible to do this kind of project in outsystems, i´m not sure if it´s actually possible to do this just using for example variables/structures instead of populating a database with prebuild information.
I image it would take a lot of work to develop a full game experience with lots of places, different routes, conversations, endings, the list goes on.
I watched a few videos on youtube about text adventure games in python or javascript but it´s normally just a proof of concept, pretty basic with just variables, ifs and a function or two.
I want to do something more advanced than that and was trying to figure out all the pros and cons before starting.
Thanks for any input.
Hello Sergio,
Awesome idea!
I think the main problem would be implementing visual resources usually found on games. But it should be possible, since the game is just data being manipulated over all the place!
Let me know if you need any help on this project!
Best regards,
Miguel
Hello Miguel! Thanks for your reply!
Yes i came up with this idea yesterday as i wanted to do something different, i know outsystems is not ideal for games but it ends up being a static game, presenting just a image (above the text) every now and then, the text and then the options that the player can choose from, like go left, right, enter room, etc, just like in the FF books.
A container to show the skills and the items it possesses would be a good idea too.
Of course i will not come up with a story of my own, i have almost all the books, just miss 1 or 2 i think, so i will have to study the book of my choosing, map the environment first and go from there.
For the sake of simplicity, there´s some adventures that take place inside a specific place, like a mansion or a huge cave for example. I was more inclined to go with the house of hell (mansão diabólica) as it seems easier just to map the several rooms and floors that the house will have.
I have been reading about relational databases and non relational databases regarding game development and it seems there is some controversy about using a relational db, people say it´s not the best approach, and using nosql would be more appropriate as the records would not be tied to the other entity because of the foreign key while doing joins.
There is always the option to use just variables and lists but i think that would become a nightmare to manage once the project evolves. The basic projects videos i saw they used arrays that contained a set of objects and just manipulated the objects when they needed to add or remove something from an array to another. This might work on a linear story but if the player can travel around and go back to were it was before, hmm i don´t know.
I have no clue out how am i going to to let the system be aware of the player position in the house at any given time, i think that´s the most tricky part.