Inside the Engine: Abuses

When is a game not a game? When it's a jar. (Wait, that's a different joke.) Regular readers of this column probably have, at some level, a love of tinkering. Tinkering can come in many forms. Some tweaking focuses on getting peak, beyond-expectations performance out of something-PC overclocking and car reprogramming are good examples. Both aim to achieve higher speeds than originally intended. Other types of tweaking focus not on improving a primary function, but on turning those preconceived notions upside-down and doing something completely different. Like using a motorcycle to power a merry-go-round. (not recommended.) Or programming a text adventure game engine to play Tetris (recommended!) Unlike some of the popular game engines in use today, WeiNGINE was designed from the ground up for a very singular purpose-to deliver a CRPG. That doesn't make it immune to tweaks and abuses-after all, a popular spreadsheet once shipped with an embedded flight simulator. It just makes them slightly less likely. With a powerful and flexible scripting language, it turns out that a surprising range of abuses are possible. We thought we were pretty clever when we created an NPC who could play a credible game of cards with the player. We were recently taken to school by engine creator Westley Weimer himself, who decided to spend a few hours this past weekend taking our game engine in a slightly unexpected direction... The game of champions? Yes, that's a match-three game being played in Mal Nassrin's arena. We won't go into a complete explanation of exactly how this works in a dedicated CRPG engine-it would take a little while-but the upshot is that it involves a grid of areainfo squares for each cell, plus a host of visual effect creatures acting as the individual game gems. At its simplest, an areainfo is used to display informational text about an object when clicked ("The table contains a bowl of fruit", "This painting is not yet dry.") But areainfos also generate the @area_info_clicked event, which lets us take any arbitrary action-such as highlighting and flashing a selected gem, looking for a second click on a neighboring gem, checking for a valid move, and starting the gems in motion. A couple of timers ensure smooth movement of the gems between the start and end points, and provide the "gravity" effect of the falling gems taking up the vacated space when a match is made. All of the "creatures" (the gems) are dynamically generated by a "new_piece" function. Add in a score and a level display (actually just two more invisible creatures displaying stringheads) and suddenly... we have a game! When we first started taking press inquiries about The Broken Hourglass, we were surprised at the amount of interest in the presence and prevalence of minigames-although in retrospect, we should not have been. Mixing up playstyles has been a staple of gaming for decades, whether as a stand-alone game concept (Lazy Jones, Wario Wares) or a break in the action in a bigger, focused game (the slot machine or lock-picking game in the RPG of your choice), and it shows no sign of fading. And they provide an interesting opportunity to differentiate a game-or to carry out some compelling engine abuse as a lark. Will we actually have a matching puzzle game playing out in the Mal Nassrin arena? Of course not. But in the hands of the right tweakers, almost anything is possible.

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