Quest Room — Carrot: A Test Of An Item-Collecting-Mission Sub-Engine That Lets You Run And Jump Freely In 3D — In PowerPoint!

The name says it all!  You can actually move freely around the quest room, and "PowerPoint" will even "know" whether or not you've left the room with or without the required item (a carrot in this case)! 

Controls:
Move the cursor around the floor to position your character in those specific cells.
Click on the cell on which you're standing to jump.
Move to the center of the room, then click that cell to walk-out and discover whether you've met the objective.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this sub-engine before I work it into some of my other PowerPoint-games!

You can try it out here, and yes, the final version will be much-more-greatly compressed:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/zdk68ow41qa8gan/Quest%20Room%20Carrot.ppsx?dl=1

It worked. It's an interesting concept. Clicking the floor to move and jump is not intuitive enough for me. Personally, I would welcome some indicators, color shades, signs or whatever to let know where to click.

[quote="Jarek"]Personally, I would welcome some indicators, color shades, signs or whatever to let know where to click.[/quote]

It may take some getting-used-to, but you basically want to move the cursor to wherever you wish for your character's feet to physically be standing upon the floor: think of your cursor as a pair of guiding-footprint-indicators for the character-model. 

That being said, there's still plenty of time before this gets worked into any of my games, so there's tons of room for improvement, indeed. 

Because the navigation-cells are grouped, though, I can't add outlines to each one, as only the perimeter would be marked.  I could paste a video-tutorial into the main-menu of each game that uses it, though, that shows you exactly what to do, complete with voice-acting.  Would that help?

*There was a long and detailed paragraphs of feedback here, until Firefox thought it would be funny to auto update. And I don't feel like retyping all of them again until I don't know when, so I'll just keep it concise for now.

- 3D free roam in ppt is very impractical, but if done right, could become something really special that makes all the maddening overcomplicated game mechanic system worth using.

- Its a good idea to give the floor tiles grid, just so the players knew what they were supposed to do. (they will see that the character is moving according to the grids)

- Or, you could make a highlight animation for the tiles when players first entered the room, I embed a video below so you understand what I am describing.

- Mind the choice of colors for your objects, bright-colored usually means 'interactable' or communicates "I am important!" whilst dim-colored means 'unavailable/unimportant background object' basically trying to say "Don't mind me, I'm not important". Players need to know what they can and cannot do, so they have a base to start and figure out the mechanics of your game. (I kept clicking around both floors and walls, in an attempt to make sense what the game wants me to do, because everything is 'screaming' "I'm important!".)

- I think Hyperlink's ScreenTip feature can be useful to tell players which tile is interactable in a specific way (example: "Interactable: Take Carrot"). Johnr made a tutorial about it some time ago, here's the thread link.

- Wouldn't it be more intuitive if the way player exits the door is by clicking the door (or the floor tile in-front of the door), rather than requiring you to go to the middle of the room?



And that concludes my initial feedback, rewritten and summarized while upset. Don't @ me or I'm blocking you, nah just kidding. Cheers~

[quote="!C8Hypela/M!!fN+hj5w"]Wouldn't it be more intuitive if the way player exits the door is by clicking the door (or the floor tile in-front of the door), rather than requiring you to go to the middle of the room?[/quote]

I am actually working on a new version of this sub-engine that shall indeed change the exit to the door itself.  I just wanted to get the navigation-system up-and-running before I made any core-changes. 

There is actually an Easter-egg that indicates my final-goal for this system: on slide 45, which is currently inaccessible by players, I've actually included a navigation-grid that features a jump-function for the center of the floor, which you can access from PowerPoint's Edit-mobe by Page-Downing to that slide, putting your cursor in the true-center of the screen (slightly above and to the left of the character's head in PPT's "Thumbnails And Slides"-view on a 16:9-display), pressing Shift+F5, and clicking on the model's head.

The reason I bring this up is because it proves that I knew that this current system would only be temporary until I incorporated a door-based hyperlink-network for exiting the room, with access-points for possible exits on all four sides being togglable in-engine.

My goal with such a system, of course, would then be to enable the hyperlinking-together of multiple Quest-Rooms: some in which you'd collect items, others in which you'd search for the designated-cell at which to discard objects for other players and NPC's to later acquire, and finally some dud-rooms that were just connectors between areas; the latter which would be clearly marked as such.

As for the grid-highlight system, I do agree that such a tool would be incredibly-helpful, and I never-quite remember that I have the Colour-Pulse animation, or whatever that was, at my disposal.  But now that I think of that, it wasn't Colour-Pulse, because an invisible-grid would first flash white before turning to the correct hue, which didn't happen in your demo.  What was that animation anyway?  I've got to add that to my "Actually-Useful-Animations"-arsenal!

As for the colours of the room, this sub-engine will be used in a game whose core-focus is art, and just like how many real rooms can have both floors and walls of bright colours to help the area appear larger and more inviting, I wanted to give the same effect here in this game, as if the artiste who serves as the game's protagonist has painted every core aspect of the title herself: sort of as if she had painting-madness.

That being said, the entire sub-engine will remain editable, even via the use of the keyboard alone, since the room is at the very back of the object-placement rig, so it'll be really easy to edit this thing, especially with the help of the Format-Painter and its perhaps overly-convenient keyboard-shortcuts (CTRL+Shift+C to copy formatting, CTRL+Shift+V to paste it to literally any applicable item on any slide at all). 

So it'll be really easy for me to just tab- and page-down-through, and adjust the formatting of each Quest-Room as seen fit at any given point in time.

Now, where do I plan to take my use of this engine in the future?  Well, once all of these optimizations have been made, I actually plan to make an almost-entirely-indoor RPG (Role-Playing Game), in which you wake-up in the center of a giant building, and you'll have to navigate your way out, facing various in-game life-threatening challenges along the way.

I know the current engine I've built isn't right for the job, but that's what feedback is for, and I greatly appreciate the lot of it that I've been receiving; thank you all so very much!

Once I've got this engine built in the way in which it should be, though, I think it could be really successful as far as PowerPoint-games go, ¿no?

Its the fill color emphasis animation, with the auto-reverse option enabled. Mind where the animation took place, right in the beginning as the character arrived at the center of the room. It is specifically placed in that 'cutscene' slide so the player wouldn't be allowed to move until the animation ended and the slide's auto-transition-after-0.1-seconds bring them to the next slide where they can actually move around.

[quote="!C8Hypela/M!!fN+hj5w"]Did you apply it to the floor-object?  Like, it almost looked like it expanded-outward in a circle.  Or it could've been because I only see 13.5% out of only my right eye, and I have ADHD, so I'm constantly looking around in order to never sit perfectly-still as I'm watching things.  [/quote]

If it did expand-outwards in a circle though, how'd you make it do that?!

The floor object, yes! I set the center-most tile to pulse first, then the adjacent tiles to pulse at the same time after the centre-tile's animation finished, and so on.

If you may, you can check the file I linked below. You can try imitating them and experiment as you like~

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lzTkDaL2ld3ataIFzhDHDKnrS2YGaava/view

!C8Hypela/M!!fN+hj5w wrote:I set the center-most tile to pulse first, then the adjacent tiles to pulse at the same time after the centre-tile's animation finished, and so on.

Thank you so very much!  Hmm, I guess I'm not-quite-pushing what small percentage of eyesight I do possess to its absolute-limits enough, or maybe I am, since I noticed that by what I thought was mistake… I don't know; what's your take on that?

I'm... not sure, lol.

Can't be helped... I guess? xP

Anyway, thanks for the pointers!  I'll make this engine better in as many ways as are seen fit for the main larger-title into which it'll be worked.

Jarek wrote:Personally, I would welcome some indicators, color shades, signs or whatever to let know where to click.

Where to click?  You've got it!  How's this?
https://www.dropbox.com/s/j25swvupepqejky/The%20JadeJohnson%20Games%20Quest%20Room%20EngineV2%20-%20Official%20PowerPoint%20Gaming%20Community%20Feedback%20Response%20Showcase0001.mp4?raw=1

Sorry for the poor frame-rate, when it comes to screen-reader-accessible screen-recorders, it's either that, or the audio-quality, which I, being 87.5%-blind myself, am not-anymore willing to sacrifice. 

As for the updated-variant of the engine itself, I'm manually taking a human-error out of it that caused the responses for passing and failing to be much-more-robotic than the amount for which I was originally intending them to be in the final-build.  Once that's completed, then I shall release it up here, with an updated link in both the main post and at the bottom of the thread.

Anyway, do you think this tutorial works better than the previous none-at-all?  If not, let me know, and I'll add grid-squares beneath the cursor as it traverses its way from the back-left corner of the room to its front-right one.