For me to build this project, I have to build towards something, in this case a graphical adventure in the early to mid 90's style. For that I need a couple of things, primarily a story to tell and the assets/graphics to tell them with.

As for the story, I have decided to use an old writing project from way back. I was developing the story of Pitt Rivers: Archaeologist in the future (You see a pattern here?). I wanted to write a cheesy short novel about this guy named after a pioneer in archaeology set in the far future. I never got around to actually properly write the thing, but much of the structure and characters are there. Seeing as graphic adventure engine are obviously perfectly suited to tell stories about protagonists who are also archaeologists, this seemed like the right story to use.

For the graphics, I fired up Cinema 4D and quickly build a cave scene for testing. This is what I came up with :

This cave scene has a few of the properties that the render engine will have to deal with. First of all, it has to be a scrolling scene as the image is wider than 300 pixels. Then it has depth and obstructions. Characters walking in the distance should be smaller than characters walking in the foreground. Also there are obstructions and hidden areas. A player should not be able to walk through the pillar and a player should not be seen behind the pillar. Also nothing should be able to get in front of the cave opening on the right.

As for the first "mission" Pitt Rivers should go on, it should be a simple game mechanic that makes use of the majority of features we need to build a fully fledged adventure game. So the goal is to get the engine up to a point where Pitt Rivers in this cave needs to pick up a stick and use it to dislodge a bolder in order to get to the next scene. Here are the assets I will start with.

Alright, alright! The character I'm going to use is blatantly ripped off from some Indiana Jones game. This will be replaced with original graphics when everything is working like it should of course. It just felt better having a period piece styled graphic in the scene.

Here we have the bolder and the stick that are part of the plot. I'm using PNG exclusively for various reasons, the main one being that it does not have artifacting and the alpha channel is going to be extremely important in all sorts of interesting ways.

This is the icon I'll be using for both the inventory and the game options and controls. While I want that LucasArts feel, I want to use the entire screen as the stage, so I won't be having the Look, Pick Up, Push and Talk icons on screen all the time. Clicking the active character will bring up the interaction options. So the story board for this scenario would be something like this :

• Click Pitt Rivers
• Choose Look at
• Look at Stick
• Click Pitt Rivers
• Choose Pick up
• Pick up Stick
• Walk to Bolder
• Click Bag
• Choose Stick
• Use Stick on Bolder
• Walk to exit

Of course the game will provide the character will all sorts of accompanying animations and test responses while tackling this "puzzle". All those components and how I implement them will have their own project logs and I come across them.

Now, I think it is time to start putting some code to file. The first thing we need to a way to load the assets. Basically this is the beginning of the data-structure, so I better not make a mess of this. Next log, I'll do the asset loader and the first pieces of game data structure.