Tasks and Quests, part I

Been working on implementing a quest/task system. Quests are one pillar of the RPG genre. Indeed, if you really think about, many RPGs can be viewed as a series of quest/tasks. So it only make sense to implement a quest system as well.

There are quite a few moving pieces in a quest system, and I have only implemented some of them. This first is the"talk" icon that appears above on the NPC's head. That talk icon is dynamic, and will only show up on NPC that actually have a quest/task for you.

The second thing I did is to implement a "template" to author quests quickly. Although the dialogue system inherited from HR is fully capable of implementing the quests, but it gets verbose and tiresome really really quickly to deal with all the branches and jumps.

With the new quest template, the "code" for the quest looks something like this if you are interested: https://pastebin.com/GzdC98Z1.

TBH the scripting portion is definitely a little over engineered at the moment. It may be well on its way to become a scripting language for the game...

Oh yeah, I thing I almost forgot to mention is that I had a decision to make on whether or not to allow the NPCs to initiate dialogue to you. For example, perhaps if an NPC is really "thirsty" maybe she should run up to you and start "asking". But the problem with that is the NPC may initiate the dialogue at really inconvenient moments and break the flow of the game.

So It's probably better to only allow dialogue initiation by the player, and have the talk icon appear on the NPC that really wants to "talk" to you. Maybe even make them follow you (for a bit?).

Anyways, lots of "background" stuff for this week, there should be more visual stuff next week and even more for the week after ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°).