Aetheria Game Engine: Documentación

An Aetheria Game Engine game is given by a world, and a world is a collection of different objects, which can be of various types:

• Rooms (also called locations), which are places in the world connected among themselves by means of paths. A room in the game world can literally represent a room in a house, but depending on the setting, it could also be a crossroads, a street, etc..
• Characters are living beings that inhabit the world, including the player, and they can move between rooms through the paths. For example, shopkeepers, waiters, enemies, animals, the player himself, etc.
• Items, which are nonliving objects found in the rooms or being carried by characters. For example, doors, keys, chests, chairs, tables, swords, money, etc..

To create a complete world, we need to do the following tasks (not necessarily in order):  

• Create game objects,  
• Create the relationships between them (e.g., a path is a relationship between two rooms. Or, if a character has an item, then the character and item are related by a “carries” relationship),  
• Give the objects suitable names and descriptions to display in the game,  
• Give the objects a behavior, so that they can react to what the player and other objects.

PUCK (Playable Universe Construction Kit) supports all these tasks in the following ways:

• Creation of objects is made in the graphical editor that spans the leftmost part of the PUCK window. The create room, create character and create item tools can be used to create objects and place them in the world: simply click the corresponding tool in the toolbar, and then take the created object to the location in the world where you wish to place it. Note: the graphical representation of the world is simply a convenience tool. The place in the panel where you locate an object has no relevance in the game, so simply place them in the most convenient position to see and handle them.
• Creation of relationships between objects is also made in the graphical editor, using the create structural relationship and create auxiliary relationship tools. To create a relationship, just click the corresponding tool, and then the two objects that you wish to relate. The graphical representation of each relationship is an arrow between the objects.
• The description of objects is made in the object panels, appearing in the rightmost part of the PUCK window. To access a given object's panel, just click that object in the graphical representation when no tool is selected. All the information about that object (names, description, etc.) will then be shown, and can be edited.
• Finally, the description of behavior is also made in the object panels. This is the part of world creation where programming comes into play, using the BeanShell scripting language. The code for each object can be modified in the “Code and Properties” tab of its corresponding object panel.

PUCK icons:

We will now see in more detail how to create a world with PUCK. We will start with First Steps: Creating Rooms and Paths.