I am looking to design a sort of life play game. I originally was going to use Ren’Py but after getting a good start on it I figured out most of the features I wanted for the game would have to be coded from scratch. I started looking around for a new engine that was more versatile and maybe would be easier to adapt and ended up here. Let me tell some of what i am looking for in this game and maybe someone can point me in a direction to start.
I am looking for a 24 hour a day open ended rpg where attributes such as hunger and exhaustion will increase over time and by doing various activities like running, swimming etc. As well as activites like eating and sleeping that would then lower them. Also, said activities would take time to complete.
I also want to be able to raise permanent player attributes (Intelligence and athletics) through game play that will allow you to do other things.
I want to be able to navigate the world but wasn’t planning on seamless navigation. Something like ‘clicking this door will move you to the corresponding room’ would work fairly well for what I want.
I want to be able to interact with and affect NPCs throughout the day as they go about set schedules.
I was planning on doing this with Daz3D and then rendering the images for each scene that gets triggered. I already have most of the locations built in there as well as NPCs and the MC. So everything would be done with pngs, jpegs or gifs to convey what was happening that isn’t narrated or spoken.
The main character would also need an inventory store items they would collect and buy.
Any advice on getting started or where to look for help would be appreciated. After looking around I’ve seen that people make plugins for Unity that allow for creation of things like VN with ease. Is there such a plugin that would allow me to add most or all of these features without having to write custom code?
If you’re considering plugins, I’d suggest the Dialogue System for Unity but it may be overkill for what you want to do. And it’s more of a general-purpose conversation system than a visual novel system. @Elringus is making what looks to be a very nice visual novel engine called Naninovel. I haven’t used it, though.
Unity has an excellent set of tutorials that cover various types of games. They don’t cover visual novels exactly, but you may find some good info there anyway.
You should break whatever you need into parts and script it individually. Test how they work alone and then piece them together.
So far based on what you wrote you want:
a time system → do you want real-time? offline time? or predetermined time?
hunger/stamina resources → you might want to add UI element to that
a run mechanic
a swim mechanic (if this is your first game, avoid, swimming/flying is not easy to implement at first)
attributes → you need a global save system and a global management of stats
scene transition (easy)
NPC AI, stats and schedules (+animations I am guessing), this is a bit difficult to plan around, do this last
an inventory system (not that easy to make but tons of tutorials on that)
sounds like you also want a questing system
Work on creating those first and then piece them together.
Literally look up the above as youtube tutorials and you should be fine.
The Dialogue System was an excellent suggestion. It has everything I need and then some. I downloaded the free version to test it out and hammered out the introduction for the game with all the variables I needed for it in short order. I will definitely be buying this before launching. I have quite a few game elements to add but after getting a feel for it the system seems more than adequate.
You need to know about networking and persistent data management. Basically it seams like your game could be done with PHP or C# ASP.Net in a browser.
If you do this in Unity then I rather suggest ASP as you can reuse C# code in both projects, although in
I am not sure how complex your front end will be but all the simulation (hunger consumption etc.) should happen on a server, otherwise it is not safe from cheating. So basically you should google on how to make a Browsergame although there are only really few good tutorials out there. Instead of generating HTML your server communicates with the Unity client.
The simplest way might be that your server only sends the timestamp and you do all the calculations locally, but that might as well be prone to hacking.
