Locking the Gates – Preventing Characters from Wandering Amok

November 29, 2019

With the critical path and side quest scripting complete in Sleuthhounds: Cruise other tasks have now opened up for me to do (testing, drawing backgrounds and animations, etc.). However, there are quite a few scripting tasks still out there to tackle as well. Before launching into a serious round of testing, I’ve been taking a bit of time to deal with a few of the larger outstanding scripting items. Specifically, I’ve been hemming in Ampson and Homes to prevent them from wandering into areas of the ship before they’re supposed to.

In many games the unlocking of new areas to explore is used as a reward and a measure of progress. The same holds true for Cruise as well. Even though the game is set aboard a cruise ship, I wanted there to be a progression through which new areas become available throughout the game. Since the ship is all one large environment this meant finding ways to limit access to different areas. For example, players don’t gain access to the off limits, crew only portions of the ship until Act 3.

While I was still implementing the critical path and the side quests I couldn’t be completely sure which areas of the ship needed to be available to players at any given moment in the game. Consequently, as I developed out the locations on the ship I didn’t spend a huge amount of effort on “gating” those areas. By that I mean, I didn’t do much by way of ensuring characters could NOT wander into a given area. In fact, early in development none of the doors on the ship were locked. The first stages involved just getting most of the locations in place and accessible, essentially creating a virtual tour of the ship as a whole.

Now that all the positive actions in the game are complete, it’s possible to take a step back, look at all the locations and figure out specifically when they’re accessible and when they’re not. I’ve assembled a spreadsheet that tracks this information along with the actions that characters have to take to gain access to locked areas. Fortunately, most of the gates were put into place as needed while developing the game. There were a few areas though where players could slip through the cracks and access parts of the ship earlier than they should be able to. However, I’ve now done a pass through to cut off those access points.

Verifying that players can only get where they need to when they need to will be part of the first big testing phase that I’m entering into here. The spreadsheet, which helped identify where all the holes were, will also serve as an impromptu checklist as I go along to ensure that yes, indeed all of those holes have been filled.