Create NPCs and their conversations

In the first part of this series, we covered setting up the first room of your point-andclick adventure, including the engine, palette I and walkable areas. We also interacted with objects, by looking at them and adding them to the inventory. The player can now use the wrench inventory item on some machine pieces to assemble a broken robot.

With the robot up and running, it’s time to give it a voice. Conversations are a natural part of any pointand-click game, providing useful hints. NPCs can also sometimes be persuaded to give players useful items.

Crafting characters

In the series so far, we’ve covered two of the main types of things with which your player can interact: items and hotspots. However, AGS also supports a third type: characters.

A character contains elements of both hotspots and objects. They can’t be picked up but they can be interacted with to have conversations. They can also move between rooms and carry their own inventory.

Look to the project tree at the top-right and expand Characters. You’ll see there the name of the main player character. By default, this is cRoger, but if you’ve been following this series, you may have changed his name to one of your own – cNate, for example.

Double-click on your character name. Under Selected Character Settings, you’ll see a notification saying this is the player’s character. This means when the game starts, you control this character and action begins in the character’s StartingRoom, as defined