Notes on a talk by Linda Kruse of The Good Evil (@ldacruz_)
- Need a flexible and maintainable system that enables efficient workflow and teamwork
- Independent of specific game mechanics
- Pipeline: artist to programmer to game designer (scripting/logic) to build process
- Problems with third party tools like Unity
- Designed for beginners
- Tedious setup
- Not flexible enough
- Only for “standard mechanics”
- Dependent on support/hard to maintain
- Conflicts between tools (e.g., lots of assets)
- Optimizing their workflow
- Can we automate repetitive tasks
- What steals creative time
- Overlapping tasks between departments
- Most hated tasks
- Tools we’re using
- Design condsiderations
- For designers
- Want to represent the full workflow from design to art to code to QA
- Power for game designers (both content and logic)
- Dialog handling (branching and localization)
- For devs
- Maintainable and independent
- Flexible for future features, mechanics, iterations (easy to update)
- Unified file management (one place for everything)
- Most important
- Readable and writable logic without reading the source
- Independent of specific game mechanics
- EvilSystem sits atop Unity to manage content management, visual scripting, and other utilities
- Visual scripting system can trigger events in the game, in the UI, etc.
- includes both scene editor and flow editor
- See video demo
- 2d scenes can be set up in PSD file with groups named in a special way—wow!!
- Tips for iteration
- Create a feature test project that shows off everything the system can do (and lets you verify everything is working)
- Analytics: make sure you know how often stuff is breaking
- For designers
