Forums » Help » Cut-Scenes

This has been in my mind for a long time.

What is the best, easiest, or simplest way to create a cut-scene?

Essentially, the game needs to enter a state where most of the player input is disabled, except for confirming to advance.

In this state, there needs to be the ability to keyframe animations (player and NPC movements), as well as set off dialog boxes, sounds and music, in order to carry the story forward.

I'm used to interfaces like Adobe After Effects and Flash to create scenes with keyframes. To think about it in terms of programming, though, seems like another beast altogether. Yet is this what is necessary? That, plus I'm a beginner programmer.

Does anybody have experience with this?

Is keyframe animation something that you achieve manually with the code, or is it something that is best accomplished with a plugin?

Thank you.

A tool with a graphical interface would be amazing.

Long time ago i made this plugin:
https://github.com/datamosh/ImpactJS-Bot-plugin
Allows you to create a bot of any entity as simple as possible.

You can see it working in a game we did for Ludum Dare 23:
http://www.datamosh.com/onlyus/

I have cutscene system up and running in my current game, but if there is a fast and easy fix, I didn't really find one. I ended up creating a cutscene system based on the SCUMM engine, lexically parsing text and setting up a queue of functions to be performed in sequence. I would MUCH prefer a graphical interface, but it gets the job done I guess.

Example script:

actor player stop
wait 2
actor player point
wait 1
actor player say Hey!


Here's a short post I wrote about it on my tumblr: http://krisjet.tumblr.com/post/59569191340/cutscene-system-for-little-big-mansion