The Quest Manager

Hi all.  For this blog post I am here talking about what we have been calling "The Quest Manager", or as my scripts refer to it, "qm".  The purpose of this quest manager is to manage the overarching quest of our game.  In short, it is the fundemental backbone of story, and making our game, a game.  And to witness in all of its glory, look down below.

This is, the whole of the quest manager, comments removed so you don't get to far ahead of the devlog.  Super basic, super simple, and down to earth quest management system. It keeps track of all the quest related things you do, and does its own bit of railroading for the player.  It turns off the ways to enter certain scenes, and we plan on making it so that certain NPC's don't say quest related dialogue until you do a prerequisite item in the quest manager.  This can be seen in the screenshot down bellow.

There are the different variables and what they do.  We will do a deep dive on each one in just a minute, but here you can see how the logic of the quest manager works.  It contains these bool values, and when the player does the next step for the quest, the bool becomes true.  For example, when the player talks to the innkeeper, the innkeeper sets the value of the NPCTalked to variable as true.  This has another effect if we look deeper into the script as well. 

Here you can see what exactly the effect of talking to the NPC and killing the bugs is.  It turns on the doors that allow you to go to the next level.  When you talk to the innkeeper, not only does he give directions on how to get to the farm, but you are now actually able to get to the farm.  When you kill the farmers bugs, you are able to go into the cave to get the mushroom to save the few that still live.  Now how do we connect these together.  Well in the next two screenshots you will see the BugTracker script and part of the dialogue script

So here is the bug tracker.  A lot to unpack here, but the general gist is there are two lists, one of total bugs, one of dead bugs.  When the amount of dead bugs is equal to the amount of total bugs, it activates the quest manager, pushing the player further down the story.  The same goes for the NPC talked to bool, however because that might be a topic for a later dev blog, the exact code will be a secret for now.  However, the general idea is the same.  There is a boolean value that gets ticked to be true, and then it ticks the quest manager to be true, activating the plot movement.

That is how the quest manager works!