RPG tutorial

The following tutorials are only meant to cover the basics of developing for the RPG. Each of the tutorials build upon the work from the previous exercises and are therefor best done in order.

Part 1

This part covers making the initial skeleton of our game.

By default the RPG detects the available games by searching data/rpg/games for cfg files, these files form the basis of what the main menu will list as the available games. In selecting a game from the menu, it will then attempt to load the definitions from an equivalently named directory.

We now know the first step to making our own tutorial game, we need a corresponding cfg and directory inside data/rpg/games'

Luckily sandbox comes with a base that can be derived to quickly get things up and running, so first up, let's make a copy of the base directory and call the copy "tutorial" and then move a file named base.cfg inside data/rpg/games/tutorial into data/rpg/games and rename it to tutorial.cfg.

We can essentially open up our game in sandbox now, but we still have a few things to do, so for now, open up tutorial.cfg in your favourite text editor. The contents should be pretty self explanatory but we do need to make a few specific changes.

Firstly, we want to set the default map and associate it with mapscript 0, for this excercise we'll name our map tutorial1.

Secondly, we want to set the version number and the compatibility number to 1.

The final version of tutorial.cfg should look similar to this

 r_reparemap tutorial1 0
 
 firstmap tutorial1
 
 gameversion 1
 compatversion 1

Save it and we have one more step to go, we need to make a map named tutorial1, so fire up sandbox and save a newmap under that name.

Congratulations! you have successfully set up the basics required to make your RPG with sandbox

Addendum

game.cfg has two explicit purposes. Firstly it identifies the existence of a game and secondly, it defines many of the important attributes of the game.

things that can and should be defined in game.cfg include

• the script and flags to use on a maps
• internal properties, such as the game version
• global game properties, such as friendly fire
• rule properties (currently not available)

Part 2

This section of the tutorial involves spawning a neutral NPC and assigning him some dialogue

Part 3

This section of the tutorial involves basic crafting, the player will receive a weapon at the end of it

Part 4

This section of the tutorial covers creating a hostile NPC and a weapon for him

Part 5

This section of the tutorial involves creating a fetch quest and overriding the HUD

Part 6

This part of the tutorial involves the creation of a basic puzzle to open a door