Questing
Any interactive storytelling game is going to have quests. Quests are designed to guide players through the story and provide a sense of progression.
In Typewriter, quests are purely a visual addition. While not required to create interactive stories, they can effectively guide players through the narrative.
Setting up the Story
To add quests to your story, we first need a story to work with. For this guide, we'll create the following quest:
- The player encounters a chasm where the wind is too strong to walk across the bridge.
- The player needs to find a way to cross the chasm.
- The player discovers magnet boots nearby.
- When wearing the magnet boots, the player can walk across the chasm.
Here's the setup for the quest:
- Setup Manifest
- Setup Sequence
This is an interactive graph of all the entries in the selected pages.
You can view different pages by clicking on the tabs. Each page contains a view of the entries in that page.
Click on an entry to view its details.
Here is a demo of the setup described above:
Creating the Quest
As you can see in the setup, Typewriter doesn't require questing components to create interactive stories. Unlike most quest plugins where quests are the main feature, in Typewriter, they serve as a visual addition – a way to guide players through the story and provide a sense of progression.
To create a quest, we first need to create a manifest page. This page will contain all the entries that make up the quest.
How Quests Work
In Typewriter, two types of entries are used to create quests: Quest
Entry and Objective
Entry.
The Quest
Entry defines the name of the quest.
The Objective
Entry defines the objectives of the quest.
Quest Entry
The Quest
Entry is used to define the quest.
A quest can be in one of three states:
- Inactive: The quest is neither active nor completed.
- Active: The quest is active and not yet completed by the player.
- Completed: The quest has been completed.
There are three important fields for the Quest
Entry:
Display Name
: The name of the quest.Active Criteria
: The criteria that must be met for the quest to become active.Completed Criteria
: The criteria that must be met for the quest to be considered completed.
The state of the quest is determined as follows:
- If all the
Completed Criteria
are met: The quest is completed. - If all the
Active Criteria
are met: The quest is active. - Otherwise, the quest is inactive.
For our quest, we'll use a Permanent Fact
to hold the state of the quest for the player.
We create the following Quest
Entry:
A quest definition
Objective Entry
The Objective
Entry defines a task that needs to be completed as part of the quest.
There are various types of objectives, allowing Typewriter to display them in different ways.
While Quests have three different states, Objectives only have two:
- Hidden: The objective is not visible to the player.
- Visible: The objective is visible to the player.
These states are influenced by both the Criteria
field and their Audience
parent entries.
For now, we'll only use the Criteria
field to determine if the objective is visible or not.
Let's set up the objective for our quest like this:
An objective definition
Finishing the Quest
For the final step, we need to change the Permanent Fact
entry to 1
when the player first falls down the chasm and to 2
when they reach the other side.
- Quest Manifest
- Quest Sequence
- Quest Static
This is an interactive graph of all the entries in the selected pages.
You can view different pages by clicking on the tabs. Each page contains a view of the entries in that page.
Click on an entry to view its details.
Here's a demo of the finished quest:
Quest Tracking
We've seen that Quests
can be in one of 3 states.
Additionally, we can Track one quest at a time.
Tracking a quest is used for displaying the quest progress to the player.
To learn more about quest display, check out the Displaying Quests Guide.