Applying the Drama Princess system to The Path is revealing yet another issue.
Most behaviours in the game can be executed with one of three “meta-behaviours”:
- Do Now
just play an animation - Do With Object
play an animation that involves an object - Do With Actor
play an animation synchronized with another actor
I’m re-using these three behaviours over and over and simply adding parameters for different Goals, Actors and Objects. So these behaviours start looking like large collections of switches. Which is not very elegant.
On top of that, there is not even such an extreme difference between these three. I’m starting to think that perhaps it may be better to only have a single script and a whole set of parameters per Behaviour, rather than a complete script for every Behaviour (which often contain overlapping systems).
The advantage of the current system is that it keeps things clear and open. A Behaviour currently can do anything. It has access to the entire game. This is very powerful and useful. This way Behaviours can control entire cut scenes and even the game flow. Even the control of the avatar is defined as a behaviour (one that is certainly too complex to fit in any of the above meta-behaviours).