Neo Story Toolkit

This project is made to give content creators a quick start for developing their own Unity games. I know how hard it is to put together all the parts you need for a working game.

There are some good toolkits out there, like Adventure Creator and Game Creator, just to name a few I have used before. But somehow I always felt I had to fight those systems after a while to make them “do what I want”.

Nevertheless I like their idea of providing some preset templates and a lot of building blocks to combine that into your own creation.

So I took what I created for our GameDev.tv Jam entry and try to build it into something that may be useful for others.

For now I am showcasing the very beginning of the toolkit in a demo, but of course the whole project will be offered as source on Github and as a source archive here. (I am in the process of making sure I do not include any copyrighted stuff atm.)

In it’s current state this project can be used to create a linear monologue story as we did for Find The Hero, but there will be dialogue and branching for sure.

Maybe in the end it will be capable of providing most of the dialog functionality that Ren’Py offers, but with all the power of the Unity engine behind it to have “full” 3D gameplay.

Currently I am creating a tutorial and a playground level showcasing the state of the project and how to set up those elements. Those are based upon the free Synty POLYGON Starter Pack, so you have to have a license for that if you want to continue using it. But the main intention is that you replace all of that with your own world, to make your creation come to life!

This toolkit does not claim to be a “no coding” tool, but it should offer enough premade building blocks to fulfill most designer challenges after some getting used to it.

The system is based upon a scriptable objects framework “Unity Atoms” and focuses on being mostly event driven. This means that you can add or omit parts that you want or do not need. E.g.: if the players health reaches 0 an event is triggered. Now you can decide what to do:

• play a die animation
• stop the player from moving (yes, it looks kinda funny if you can move your dead body around)
• trigger a level restart
• optionally enable some particle effect
• optionally add some sound
• set some switches you need later in the story…

Of course with flexibility comes complexity, so if you really want to dive into the bowels you need to understand how to use the Unity event system and what all those methods and settings can do for you.

On the other hand there are a lot of prebuilt components you can immediately use and adapt to your own scenes:

• a trigger component that lets you do “things” when a player runs into a trigger
• a timer component with similar functionality
• a navmesh helper that lets you refine the shape of your walkable areas and helps to define jumps or climbs (this needs some future work to allow e.g. climbing ladders while playing the matching animations)
• some prefabs offering damage, healing, pick up, change scene…
• ….

The list of components and the logic behind it is already too much to be put in this starter document so I started to write a documentation inside the project.

Let’s see if this is the beginning of some useful tool that will be used to create many great games or just some weird idea I had ;)