Apps How would I go about making a game like this ?

[Sherman1873]

Alright, first I want to say sorry for the title, I know I could have done much better.
Now that I have mentioned that I will explain why this thread was made.

I recently played some of the Lifeline games and they got me really inspired to make something similar, a text based adventure game where you have only a few simple pre-made choices to pick from and a great story.

I am a writer and a tech guy, but never really got into code. All I did was plan.
So I don't know java or any coding language anywhere near enough to make such a game, but I imagine that this type of a game would be the simplest to make, or one of the easiest possible games. Simple tree story progression.


Anyhow, so I decided to write a great story and make a similar game to Lifeline, or Lifeline 2.
What I am searching for is a great video or text tutorial explaining how to make a similar android game.

After searching throughout the internet I could only find tutorials for simple apps and very basic games, not anything like Lifeline, however I guess that is where I should start and after I learn how to use the code properly I should progress onto making a tad more complex game such as, again "Lifeline".



So I am asking the community to share links to any tutorials which explain how to tackle such a complex task. It didn't matter how hard I tried, I just could not find anything that would help me learn how to make such a game, I hope that I wouldn't need to learn a lot of java before I could start working on this genre. The game shouldn't be too complex to make. I hope.



Thank you for reading this whole message ! I am awaiting your response : ).

 

[Deleted User]

While not graphically complex, I would say a game like this has a lot of complex logic needed to track objects, locations, player actions, and linkage between all these things. I'd imagine that you would need to carefully design the database to store all this information.
Interestingly, there are tools out there to help people create text based adventure games, Quest being one of them. Just have a look at this video tutorial to see the complexity involved in linking all this stuff together.

http://textadventures.co.uk/quest#video

 

[Sherman1873]

While not graphically complex, I would say a game like this has a lot of complex logic needed to track objects, locations, player actions, and linkage between all these things. I'd imagine that you would need to carefully design the database to store all this information.
Interestingly, there are tools out there to help people create text based adventure games, Quest being one of them. Just have a look at this video tutorial to see the complexity involved in linking all this stuff together.

http://textadventures.co.uk/quest#video

Thanks for the response, while most text based adventure games are complex and do require a lot of logic behind them, this one should not. It is a very simplistic text based adventure game where the player always has two options, each leading into new branches of choices. So all that would have to be configured is that when a player chooses option a instead of b - show options 1a and 2a instead of 1b and 2b, and so on and so on.

And I know that many tools to make such a game do exist, but they are all for windows, I am just searching for a tutorial on how to make such a game on android using the android SDK (even though I haven't even used it before)

And even if I were to use one of those tools for windows I am not sure if they would let me publish my game since I have used their platform, and I want to be able to launch it from an executable, instead of the player having to go to a link in order to play the game.

 

[Deleted User]

Well the code for this could be quite compact, if all you need is binary tree traversal. This could be done neatly using a recursive algorithm.
But I'm not surprised you can't find any tutorials, because, well to put it bluntly, I don't think such a game would be very interesting to the player.

 

[Sherman1873]

Well the code for this could be quite compact, if all you need is binary tree traversal. This could be done neatly using a recursive algorithm.
But I'm not surprised you can't find any tutorials, because, well to put it bluntly, I don't think such a game would be very interesting to the player.

Yeah, I think that is what I need, but I disagree about such a game not being interesting to the player, Lifeline is a great example of a game like that.

 

[Deleted User]

If you want an architectural design pattern to use in your code, I think the Visitor is the one to use here. The Visitor is designed to do some operation on each node in a structured set of elements (e.g. tree)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visitor_pattern
https://dzone.com/articles/design-patterns-visitor
http://www.tutorialspoint.com/design_pattern/visitor_pattern.htm

 

[Sherman1873]

If you want an architectural design pattern to use in your code, I think the Visitor is the one to use here. The Visitor is designed to do some operation on each node in a structured set of elements (e.g. tree)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visitor_pattern
https://dzone.com/articles/design-patterns-visitor
http://www.tutorialspoint.com/design_pattern/visitor_pattern.htm

Thanks for all of the info, but I really suck with code, unless I could find a very detailed step by step tutorial that any dumb'o could follow or I could use something like RenPy I don't see how I could make such a game