Typing Game

For this prototype, my goal was to make a typing game that also held a complex story. The current system is set up to only have one ghost, but there is the option to have multiple already coded in. While this system would greatly benefit from a dialogue tree, my goal was to find creative ways to utilize the tools I already know. My first objective was to create the typing in the player blueprint.

When IsTyping is true, these events occur. They are separate from the normal typing due to how it is set up. When the player presses a letter, the display name is printed to the screen. If the player wanted to press space, then spacebar would appear rather than " ". These keys were added to the excluded keys list.

Any key not in the English alphabet was removed for the purpose of typing. While including them would not break any of the code, it would break immersion for the player. Some keys were needed for functionality (as shown above), and they were also added to the list.

From there, the typing widget was created. It held many different events including: printing a key to the screen, adding a space, deleting a letter, and entering the phrase.

Once the typing was set up, the NPC to talk to the player became the next objective. They were created modular so that the same NPC model could be used for different conversations. All the user would need to do is set the ghost index.

Finally, I created the dialogue box that appears when a player interacts with a ghost. This contains all of the conversations for the ghosts and can be expanded upon for a bigger game. The system would be complex to manage on a larger scale due to the primitive nature of it, but it could work.

As previously stated, my goal was to utilize what I already knew. Given the current age of the Internet, it is easy to look up tutorials for every mechanic. While that is beneficial, it can cause designers to stagnate and not learn any new code. I wanted to push the limits of my knowledge rather than listening to somebody who did that.

Here is how the current system works. It runs off of switch statements and inputs.

The player is unable to type messages from previous indexes. If the response is not correctly typed, then no progress will occur. In the future (if this is turned into a full game), there would need to be feedback added to tell the player what they got incorrect.

This game could act as both a typing practice as well as a fun narrative experience. I also planned to add other first person mechanics to the game, but I am not currently finishing the idea. It is something that I will potentially come back to.

Here is a video that showcases the final results of the prototype: