Building the Dragon Engine Script

 Hello. C J here. I’ve got some work done on the script for Dragon Engine. My plans for the top down pixel game Monad are likely on hold for a while as I port all of them over to making a Minecraft Bedrock Edition server. I’ll get a server laptop for it and host it myself. There are some amazing looking Minecraft servers out there, often with a ton of players all the time. If you’re familiar with Minecraft then you may be wondering why I’m highlighting this.

Nowhere else on the internet is this busy. Everyone and their stuffed animals are on Minecraft. I’m going to have to play a game I didn’t make for once. Anyway, the server will be fun. Dragon Engine is a very different game. It has no hunger, does not permit farming in the Story mode and has a different licensing structure for selling in-game creative content. The main difference is its script.

The original plan I had for the video game was that it could self-generate quests and maintain playability indefinitely. I’ve got some of the structure for this figured out. All of the quests, quest dialogue and game state updates are held in the player’s Journal. This is not an inventory. There isn’t one. Players can gather resources that show up physically in crates at their base camp. If you find a campfire in the world you can save, end the day and go to camp. Crafting and resource management happen here only.

Going into a day of adventure you save on exiting your camp and you can take four items with you, mapped to the D-Pad as it was known back in the console era. This is it. You never track ammunition or potions but you do track vitamins as your health and stamina bars. Taking trail mix or crackers with you takes up an item slot but can heal you without returning to camp. Health is called Heat and when it runs out you can’t fight. Sleeping at camp heals all five vitamin bars. Shopping for food in a city can also heal you based on where you shop. Yes, ice cream heals Heat. This is my game and I want my favourite food in it.

The Journal tracks updates about the player’s status and the game world. At the end of a day you can save the entire adventure log as a .txt file. They should make for fun reading later. The script is held entirely in the player character’s Journal. NPCs trigger the Journal to speak but do not contain dialogue. The dialogue is self-generating out of sets of paragraphs with a shared job each set. The code behind this is proprietary and is called Runes. I’m planning a study desk location where you can use the Runes system to generate text and share it as an in-game .txe file in a book. Yes, it can write adventure novels.

The system is divided into nested shells. The largest, top-level shell is gold quests. There are not many of these and they contain a brief description of the goal with some spoken dialogue along with three steps. These three steps are silver quests. These state three actions each based on a location each action. There are a lot of these and the game will pick one at random that fits the gold quest. A silver quest mandates three steps and these are tied to bronze quests. A bronze quest is the actual individual dialogue for a sword swing, social combat move or crafting action. They are tied to what location they happen in. Sitting eating is a separate paragraph from walking outdoors.

I’m hoping this sounds simple enough because once set up it won’t require effort to run. Here’s a breakdown of the main story for the prologue to Absolute, the game’s main storyline.

Gold Quest
Warlord

Do the Following Silver Quests
Organize
Delve
Create

Silver Quest
Resupply
An Organize Quest

Do to the Following Locations
Street
General Store
Lounge – Social Combat

Sample Bronze Paragraph

    It took a while but that was the resupply done. They went through mostly civilian channels for it and that turned out to work. The prices were good and they weren’t obviously buying for any reason. If this happened again they would know better how to handle it.

This is pretty much how the code will look. Most of the enemies in the game are summons. The prologue to Absolute involves an incident involving a missing mercenary, a stolen piece of equipment and massive amounts of summoned elementals. Whoever made them all clearly wants war with the city of Ascala. The prologue will be included in the core release and is set in South District Ascala. One of my next projects is mapping and planning out that more using the script engine as a guide. The core release also comes with the tutorial March on Ishrayl, set in the Eternity region in the city Ishrayl. More settings are planned as DLC.

C J Mcpherson