Adventures Without Effort (AWE)

AWE is the flagship of the Bingwood project, the editor and the engine upon which everything has been built. The unfortunate name was thought of before the project was actually started. Once we realized that the editor itself wasn't going to chip in workwise, we came up with more realistic words to match with the acronym (Adventures With Ease). Be that as it may, Bingwood couldn't have been done without it.

AWE works as a comprehensive resource database for all the images, sounds effects, music files, voice lines etc. It allows for the designer to place the resources into the scenes and assign scripts to them. The designer can also preview the scene he is working on with a push of a button. AWE also boasts a simple animation editor in which the sound effects can be triggered to play during specific animation frames. AWE also packages the game into a binary file. Games created with the editor are almost completely data driven, which allows for easy porting if the need arises.

AWE also features a scripting language of our own design, with which the whole game has been put together. This intuitive and simple scripting language supports variables, IF-statements as well as several dozens of different commands. An AWE script assigned to a shovel in the game might look something like this:

FUNCTION TAKE
   QUEUE1 HERO GOTO -32 76
   QUEUE1 HERO FACE "W"
   QUEUE1 HERO SAY "This shovel looks useful!"
   QUEUE1 HERO ANIMATION "PICKUP"
   QUEUE1 HERO TAKE SHOVEL
END FUNCTION

The Dialogger

The Dialogger is another tool created for the Bingwood project, used to create dialog trees. They are built up creating individual dialogue nodes connected to each others. Each node contains the actual spoken line (linked to the equivalent voice file), the player character's reply options and triggers to specific scripted events. The 2.500 lines of dialogue with the accompanying voice files make up more than half of the size of the whole game.

The flow of the dialogue is controlled by connecting nodes with each others. Scripted conditions can also unlock previously hidden parts of a dialog and trigger game events when particular dialogue nodes are visited.

The AWEsome Future

Creating a game with self-made tools has been an educational journey. The tools are far from perfect, some unsavory changes were made as a result of new features being added along the way. These learnings will most definitely be used when creating the AWE 2 (if we ever get around to making it). The plan is to make the scripting system work similarly to the Dialogger, being completely visual and doing away with text-based script writing. The resource management and saving/loading system (which caused some gray hairs in this project) will also be remade from scratch. While AWE was a nice tool to get the job done, AWE 2 will be one heckuva shining jewel...