The Interaction System: The Heart of the Game

My most significant piece of work across the entire game must have been the interaction system – It’s a single script that runs all of the interactable npc’s and the obstacles in the player’s way.

We needed a way to create a lot of different interactable characters quickly, so I built a modular tool that can run almost any of our characters. The Interaction tool starts pretty simple, when you place it on an object, it just shows a default score value, and a few simple properties, but the important one here is “Is Obstacle” – this one designates the interaction as something the player just runs into and takes damage, with a few options below for reactions to the player hitting them.

If IsObstacle is turned off, however, the tool suddenly expands to show several more options. Turning this switch off designates the object as interactable, and now allows you to choose which power is the correct one to hit the npc with, which is half right, and the wrong one. Below this, I’ve added several other relatively self-explanatory options to help bring the characters to life.

Once we toggle these options on, the tool expands another time to allow you to configure each action very specifically, we can set a direction to move for the first two, specify which reactions cause an animation or play a sound, and set certain objects to toggle on and off

Here are a few examples of real applications of the tool:

Cone:

Baby:

Broken Car:

This tool was made possible using another type of script called an Editor script, which reads the values from the Interaction script and decides what to draw in the editor, to help restrict unnecessary options from our designers. Without this, the tool would always look even bigger than the final two screenshots! That would have cluttered the editor up for more simple objects and made it harder to work with other components on the same object.

Please give the game a try, the android install file is available on our page, check back later to get it directly on google play!