Interactive Building - Nougat Cave Hunt and the Key/Door Example

Last Thursday I spent a couple of hours overnight setting up a very simple (as far as game mechanics go) game in the SW City Airpark Pavilion.  The game, called Nougat Cave Hunt, is a simple seek-and-find where the player is prompted to collect and return 10 items (nougats, a creature of the SW City lore) within 120 seconds.

Pesky little critters them.

The mechanics for keeping count of the items and the time elapsed was done with SW City Interactive, but similar applications can developed in Active Worlds using only action commands.  There are certainly some limitations, but creative design can usually overcome them.


The Simple Hunt

When designing a game in AW, my experience has been that its best to think about the game mechanics first, and then work from there.  This is because there are a lot of things that object scripting leaves to be desired, and sometimes you have to tweak your concept a bit to get everything to line up.  In this example, we'll run with the concept of a hunt for an item, but since AW doesn't really do counting instances very well we will switch things up a bit.

CONCEPT: Player has find a hidden key, and click it to open a barred gate.

This is a simple game concept that has been executed in Activeworlds many times, but it is a good place to start because it gets builders thinking and creative and multiple uses of building commands.  With this in mind, lets introduce our objects.

KEY OBJECT ACTION LINE: activate visible no, solid no, move 0 4 0 time=3 wait=10 smooth name=gate

GATE OBJECT ACTION LINE: create name gate

So now we have our two objects.  See?  Simple.  Basically, what happens here is that the activate trigger applied to the key causes it to disappear from the scene (visible no, solid no) and it also causes the gate to rise 4 meters because the move command has a name parameter that is applied to the gate (name=gate, create name gate).

It isn't difficult to expand on the complexity of this interaction and make it into a challenging mini-game.  For example, you could set more keys and more doors, and require the player to pass through the gates before the wait parameter expires.  You could also set a hard time limit using a timer command.

There are many possibilities for hide-and-seek style gaming with object scripting, and if you'd like to share any examples... feel free to post them in the comment section!

AWG Download - Kingmaker Interactive Game

Kingmaker Interactive Game (4 AWGs)

• Kingmaker Interactive Game
• An interactive card game where the player must pick one of three cards; if the card is a king, the player wins.
• Timer sequence includes a card alternator so that the result isn't always the same
• Timer sequence includes a reset for players so they can play as many times as they'd like
• AWG includes a custom logo for Kingmaker
• AWG includes a 2-coordinate wide pavilion for the Kingmaker game

DOWNLOAD: Click here to download HA_kingmaker.zip

SEED OBJECT: Centered on AWG, facing North

COORDS: AW 7950.428s 1492.491e 2.0a 178

Just save the .zip file to your Activeworlds > Presets folder and you'll be good to use the AWG in Activeworlds.  Good luck!

Decided on a class topic for Saturday

I'll be teaching a class in AWSchool on Saturday as part of the new AWUniversity effort, and the topic will be Interactive Building.  This continues in the vein where Byte began last weekend while covering timers, but I think I'll be moving in a different direction with it.  My feel of it as of today is that I won't be going over a specific command, but rather showing some examples of how to use multiple commands in tandem and encouraging creative uses of commands to achieve an interactive scene.

So for example, picture a scene where a man greets you upon entering a room and tells you that the door to the room beyond is locked.  You can open it, but he's lost the key!  If you can find the key, you can use it on the door and open it to continue forward.  This is an easy interactive scene to set up, and in its simplest incarnation only requires the use of the say and visible commands to set up.  You would, of course, want to use other commands to enhance the quality of the scene, but in general the creative combination of commands can provide a vivid experience in the virtual environment.

Ideally I would get to teach the class after Byte's shear/skew class, with some time for intermission.  I'd like to set up some interactive examples perhaps half an hour before the class starts and let people play with them, and then we could get right into it.  If you have any examples of things you would like to see just let me know, and I'll try to have that set up as well.

If I have some time to get into Active Worlds this week, I'll take some video of some existing examples of cutscenes and interactive games that I've worked on and post them up here.  Stay tuned!