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You’ve downloaded WME and now you’re probably wondering what actually this WME is. WME is a professional adventure game development kit which consists of two parts. Highly advanced development tools used for creating adventure games and WME interpreter which brings the games you’ve created alive.
Now before we start, let’s talk about some of the adventure games so you’d recognize, you’ve selected the correct tool. There’re many types of games called “adventure games” by different gamers. Some says adventure games are so called “interactive fiction”, you proceed through game world by typing commands as “open door, push button, kill troll” and the game responds with text or with some basic imagery. Then there are many action/adventure games where the adventuring consists of pushing a lever here or there etc. Although you probably could make the aforementioned games in WME too, it’s not primary focus of the engine.
WME is focused (but not limited to) on so called Point’n’Click adventure games. Those games may or may not contain inventory, they may or may not contain avatar for main hero or other non playable characters. Basic of the game play is focused mainly on puzzle solving being it intricate dialogues, logic or inventory combining puzzles and interacting with a game world. There have been hundreds of such games created in the history. You can start with Lucas Arts (Lucas Film) games from Maniac Mansion to Full Throttle or Grim Fandango. Or you can look at the recent games like Syberia or The Longest Journey. Key of those games lies in a story. You basically need to tell a tale and use game as a medium to do so. As a side note there is a certain subset of so called Puzzle Adventures. There is story not as much important as puzzle solving. You can for example think of Myst and various Myst clones, where the stories are more basic. Also currently you can also use keyboard control to control your characters as Grim Fandango or Silent Hill does. So if you feel, this is what you wanted the engine to do, then WME is the right choice for you.
Let’s first look what lies inside your WME package:
While the aforementioned tools are critical for the basic design, the heart and soul of your game lie in scripts which you’ll be writing. WME is not a tool where you can click your way through. But as a reward for your scripting it is the most flexible engine for creating adventure games which is also completely accessible to independent developers.
Before we dive into the details of WME game creating, I want to speak a bit more about game design process in general. There are always many ways leading to the same or similar result so if you feel that your way is better simply go with it. My advice here is for people who are clueless or who are interested in the way how other people do the job.
Here’re some basic questions you could ask yourself before you start with a game coding.
As you can see, the first three points are very practical whilst the others are more conceptual. Nonetheless, those are the basic questions, which determine the fundamental way how to approach the game creation. Especially the last point deserves a very special attention. It’s very easy to have an idea about some game. It can be even pretty, pretty, ultra mega giga cool idea with sugar on top, but the path from an idea to a complete game lying on the shelf is very hard. And how would you feel if after one year of intense work you’re stuck and you don’t know how to proceed?
So my moral of this, maybe a bit unrelated to WME talk is, that you can make an incredible amount of work without even touching the tools, which will save you a lot of problems down the road. You could have the story written (when the game is in production, you don’t have that much time for that anyway), you could have your ideas about the puzzle design (you don’t want to realize that you made a clickable movies without any challenges in it), you can write dialogues, flesh out characters, have your ideas about sounds, music, graphic style etc. etc. All this belongs to something called a design document and it’s the document where you can also concentrate all your ideas about the game. It doesn’t mean that everything from the document will get into the game. It’s usually much less, but it’s a vital thing of any game developer, who means it seriously with a game design.
But I think that this was enough of boring chat and you’re definitely eager to start with something more WME’ish so here goes.
Let’s look at the architecture of your typical WME game. I’ll give you an overall, a bit simplified diagram of WME functionality so you can grasp the basic concept.
As you can see, it’s easy to split functions in two halves - global functionality for the whole game and local functionality for individual scenes. In the following chapters we’ll dive deep about each area of this diagram. Before we move on the individual tools, I’d like to explain some terminology used in the diagram.
Now we have some basic overview of the engine how it’s structured and before we start with discovering the tools, let’s make some preparation work.
⇒ Go to the directory where your WME resides and locate the folder called projects. In this folder copy the folder wme_demo to something else - for example sandbox. This will be our sandbox as we’ll discover how WME works and build on top of this demo. If you enter the newly created folder, you’ll see inside the file called wme_demo.wpr. This is WME project file and if WME was successfully installed, we can open it by double clicking on it. This opens the first tool we’re going to cover: Project Manager.
As you can see, I’ve added numbers to parts of the Project Manager and we’ll discuss them separately. But before we do that, press F5 or the red exclamation mark located in the area 5 to get your first taste of WME. When you’re done with playing the demo, come back and we’ll speak more about project manager.
As you already saw, Project Manager is here for several purposes. You can set the global game parameters here, you can create new scenes you can use additional tools (Sprite Edit, String Table Manager), you can run your game in the debug environment or you can compile your game and create the version other people get without having to install WME.
So let’s not waste any time and we’ll start right away with section 1. I’ve cut it into individual section and note, that the + or – sign denotes the tree. So you expand the tree by clicking on + and collapse it by clicking on -.
So the very first section is about the startup settings. First you see the game resolution. Demo runs in 800x600 unlike Ghost in the Sheet which you can see here and note, that you cannot change the resolution during the game. Also it would be complicated to convert everything to higher/lower resolution in the course of game creating so think about this well and then set the resolution once for the whole course of the game designing.
Registry path is the path in Windows Registry where the game stores information (or additionally you can store some custom parameters as well).
Require 3D accel. (yes/no) if set to Yes the game won’t run unless you have 3d accelerator card. Note that this setting is nowadays obsolete as nearly every single computer has 3d accelerator card installed. Also if you’re going to use 3D actors, you’ll have to check this value to yes.
Require sound (yes/no) is the option which forces the sound card hardware to be present in the computer otherwise the game won't run.
Hardware T&L Specifies the usage of hardware transform and lighting. This option is only useful for games using 3D characters, there's no point in enabling it for fully 2D games. Hardware T&L moves some 3D calculations from CPU to video card, which can significantly improve performance when using Direct3D 9.
Use Direct3D 9 If enabled, the game will take advantage of Direct3D 9 (as compared to Direct3D 8 when this option is disabled). Currently the only advantage is better performance for 3D characters when using hardware T&L.
Allow windowed (yes/no) puts in case of yes to the initial dialogue window option to run the game in window instead of full screen.
Allow 3D settings Specifies whether the game settings dialog contains advanced 3D settings. These include: antialiasing, hardware T&L. If your game is using 3D characters, enable this option. Otherwise disable it.
Allow accessibility (yes/no) shows in case of yes in the initial dialogue window the tab with extended accessibility features like sending all captions and other texts to speech synthesizer, setting hotspot highlighting on keyboard shortcuts or pausing the game upon pressing special shortcut. Those are mainly for visually challenged gamers.
Allow about tab (yes/no) puts in case of yes to the initial dialogue window the About tab which shows WME logo, its creator and other about information.
String table is the last information in this section. It contains the filename of the translation file. You can here either select another file, remove this file or open the file in the editor. We’ll get more into this file in the chapter dedicated to localization.