Insanity Games

AdvEngine protects users from having to write their own engine, and leaves them to concentrate more on the creative side of making an adventure game, namely the plot, graphics, sounds and script. This will reduce development time considerably.

A graphic adventure is vaguely like an interactive stageplay. It involves actors (called characters), which perform in front of a backdrop (such as the 'interesting' scene in the screengrabs) which can change. They use props (or objects) and can exit to other locations.
They also follow a script, and the characters in AdvEngine follow one also. Without a script, an adventure game wouldn't go anywhere.

Most games utilise a plot of some sort. Beat 'em ups and most driving games tend to have little or no plot, and if they do, they are usually weak. The nature of a graphic adventure game dictates that a strong plot is essential, as it plays on the popularity of stories.
The end user will have chosen to sit down and become immersed in a fictional story-world where anything can happen, within the confines of the world.

Obviously, there's a lot of graphics to be drawn, as even in one location, a backdrop must exist to set the scene, followed by graphics for objects in the scene, such as a book which may be picked up by the player. The main character itself must be drawn, and as they have a habit of moving, a graphic for each frame of animation must be drawn.

Sounds play an important part in setting the atmosphere, and should not be overlooked. Sound effects and music can often lull the player into a sense of realism, especially if they are ambient sounds which do not draw attention to themselves, such as the sound made when a player walks over cobbled stone paths, or when they are close to a tree, and the birds begin to sing...

Finally, a script must be written which tells the characters what to do. As in theatre, it will involve lines which the characters will speak at certain times, as well as events which cannot be controlled by the player, such as making characters walk to particular places, or acting out a cut sequence.

AdvEngine does not take all of the programming away from the user - only the part which would deter most would-be adventure writers, as sitting down with a copy of C++ with no real goal other than to write an adventure can be daunting.

However, if all the programming was taken away, then any game created with AdvEngine would be the same as every other in terms of what the characters say, what they do, and the puzzles presented to the player. In order to allow you to write a different game from the next person, a simple programming language is used, and explained below.

The heart of AdvEngine relies on a scripting language called Bob (for no particular reason).
From Bob, you can load and position characters, objects and backdrops, move them to new positions, hold conversations with other characters, or alter anything you want.
From a single Bob script, you define what happens when the player does something in a location, as mundane as opening a door, to blowing up a neighbouring planet when you turn on the tv.

The beauty of Bob is that it is external to AdvEngine itself, so you do not have to understand the language AdvEngine is written with just so you can make your character say "Hello".

Bob will also be fully documented, so you will have no problems writing BobScripts.