Question

I’m trying to make a visual novel in flash, I have created the UI and the characters, but I don’t know what could be the best approach as how to load the dialog and how to save them. I’ve been thinking about external files, but I don’t know what could be the best type of files to do so. Also, when I load the game I want it to continue in the same scene and with the same variable values (obviously) is there a way where you can save all of them (like an image of the game).

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I’ve been working on a flash game that will need chains of dialogue and repeated sets of interactions. My idea is to create a “cut scene” class that would load up a xml file which goes to describe any number of different pieces of dialogue, available user actions, etc. I haven’t built it yet, so its just theoretical at this point, but I think the idea is sound. In your case, you could use this approach to describe, say, an individual page, that would contain individual panel nodes, characters, dialogue, etc. In your parsing class, simply build your elements based on this data. In this case, maybe you have a different xml file for each page, then.

As far as saving your state, I think shared objects, flash cookies or whatever is probably the right way to go.

I this scenario, the user would come back to your app, the current page ID would be registered, xml would then load, and finally the page view would be constructed.

Maybe that helps?

Cheers!