Quinn Blogs

Click here for part 1 of the Create your First ALPACA Tutorial

We’ve got our character, our environment, and our primary goal. Now we just need to add a simple puzzle and we’ll have a complete (albeit super bare-bones) game. The player needs to get a keycard in order to use the teleporter. We could just make a keycard and put it on the floor; this would be the same process as making the teleporter, except we’d have to give the keycard a “_G” tag in order to add it to the inventory (in other words, its instance name would be keycard_O_G, making it an obstacle and a Gettable object). But let’s make the first room a little more interactive instead. This will also give us an opportunity to create a Usable object.

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Click here for part 1 of the Create your First ALPACA Tutorial

Now that we’ve created our first room, let’s add a second one. Really, this will be the other side of the same room, but since ALPACA doesn’t allow for scrolling backgrounds yet, this is our best way to make the environment feel a bit more expansive.

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Click here for part 1 of the Create your First ALPACA Tutorial

OK, we’ve created a new player character, so a big chunk of our work is already done. Now we need an appropriate environment for the game, something a little nicer than the default orange plain of nothingness. How about a futuristic-looking space station? We’ll go with the clean white THX-1138 look, because it’s cool, and more importantly, it’s easy to draw.

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Since my wall-o’-text documentation for ALPACA is probably not the friendliest introduction to the engine, I figured I would do a quick tutorial series showing how you can make a simple one-puzzle game using the engine. I’ll try to incorporate as many of ALPACA’s features as I can while still keeping things easy and accessible.

We’ll base this game around that adventure game puzzle you may remember as “basically every adventure game puzzle ever” – finding a key and using it to open a door.

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