The past couple of weeks I’ve been programming a game engine and editor for my continuous interactive fiction prototype. The engine simultaneously displays the game state in two dimensions in a window with OpenGL and accepts input and displays output text on the command line. The final game will probably lack a two dimensional display, however I might play with the idea of keeping it. Currently, it’s vital to allow editing of the game world, which occupies two dimensional space rather than a discrete logical space. Also, the game engine updates the game state in real-time, but the final game will update the game state progressively as the player requests more text to read with the scrollbar, mouse wheel or keyboard arrows.

The editor allows the designer to build arbitrary two dimensional meshes out of triangles, which will provide sufficient complexity to construct a series of interior spaces, complete with rooms of varying shapes, hallways that twist and turn and different types of doors. The meshes will also support calculating shortest paths for AI pathfinding algorithms and visibility information, vital for player and non-player navigation and determining which elements of the game need to be narrated to the player based on what the player can see or hear. The editor supports moving, scaling and rotating of vertices, edges and triangles. It also supports creation of new triangles through extrusion or duplication, and deletion of existing triangles. The following images illustrate all of these editor actions. Completed designs may be saved and loaded to and from text files in the JSON format.

My next tasks are to implement AI pathfinding to provide player navigation, add room labels and colors (for the editor display), add game items and non-player characters, and implement a prototype automatic narration system that describes the player moving about the interior spaces of the game world.