It walks! It talks!
Yet another switcharoo, and I've settled on AGS for the game engine. There are several reasons for this:
- The documentation is exhaustive, with many people compiling their own manuals, as well as video tutorials of varying quality.
- It comes with some sensible demo modes and prebuilt mockups, allowing me to easily choose an interface type.
- There's already an inventory system as well as save/load functionality.
- Anything else would probably be overkill.
It's pretty easy to get the character to walk behind objects, make areas clickable, and it just seems... straightforward.
Sticking this area together from my drawings, and making it actually work took a couple of hours. OK, you can't interact with anything beyond walking over to it and commenting, yet, but I'm pretty pleased.
Animating the main character (The Gardener) took an additional few hours in Gimp.