Robo-Ninja Puppets

So now on Robo-Ninja I have the fun little diversion of figuring out how to do the scripted sequences for the beginning and ending stories. It will consist of little more than a handful of characters (Robo-Ninja, Prof. Treeblot, and Dr ?, maybe a robot guard) moving around and having word bubbles over their heads.

But I need a nice way of scripting it.

So that's what I'm currently working on, which is fun because it's a different sort of thing. I decided to not go all out and embed a lua interpreter in my game, but I AM making a super-simple script language that I'll run for each character.

I've extended my GameCharacter class (which handles drawing characters, animated them, detecting collisions with other characters) to create a new class that follows a script. Now I just need to actually implement the script system (and parser!)

I haven't finished planning it out fully yet, but I'm envisioning something like:

2.5   moveto 132,234
1.5   say    This is text that he will say!
1.5   wait
2.5   moveto 132,234

Where the first number is the amount of time to spend doing the action, the next token (separated by whitespace) is the action to take (I'm not sure I need much more than those 3 actions, unless I need some way to specify additional animation frames that a character should do (ie facial expressions?)). The moveto command should be smart enough to move at the right speed to take the amount of time specified on the left. And be smart enough to make sure the character is facing the right direction, showing the "walk" animation, etc.

Now I just need to sit back and think about whether I'm missing anything important. (And I'm still trying to decide if instead of a "wait" command I should include absolute start times on each command. That would be more complicated for me if I had to rearrange and re-time everything, but it might be easier for keeping multiple character's script information in sync. I'll still have to think on that.)

In other news, I got my Atari enemy display kernel working with 2 enemies right now. (No wall collision detection yet though). I'll see if I can get that 3rd enemy working, then try to tackle the collision detection.