Denki Guy

Denki Guy (電気ガイ) is an electrician who will rig up all of the houses in the buroughs of your denkigai (電気街), the electric town... Akihabara.

What is it really?

It is a small framework based on the akihabara html5 gaming engine with rails developers in mind. The emphasis is less on a rich gaming experience and more on easily generating a 2d top-down jrpg style map for players to explore. A lot was cut from the original framework, and entrances to other pages (which actually require a new url) were added to enable a new take on the familiar paradigm of content + links.

Dependencies

• rails 3
• jquery

Setup

1. Start a rails project
2. add the line "gem 'denki_guy'" to your Gemfile
3. bundle install
4. rails generate rpg
5. Add in the jquery javascript file in application.rb like so: <%= javascript_include_tag 'jquery' %>

Note about (5): There are a few ways to switch over to jquery. The key is to not have any of the prototype files messing up the game. So that means <%= javascript_include_tag :defaults %> will cause you problems, along with any inclusions of prototype.js, effects.js, dragdrop.js, or controls.js.

Usage

• A route will be created at whatever you used for the map name (/map_name) Visiting this will give you a pretty good idea of what the generator created
• To customize the sprites available, you will want to edit the images at public/images/game/ (by the way: denki guy doesn't have its own image editor. It's photoshop or pixen to the rescue)
• To change what sprites are used in the game, public/javascripts/game/resources.js is your friend
• To change how npcs (and their dialogues) and other large objects such as the house would be added, edit public/javascripts/game//_npc.js
• To change how the less consequential sprites are added to the map, edit public/javascripts/game//_map.js
• To see a handful of other setting for your map, look at public/javascripts/game//_settings.js

Future Features

• Additional map types that can be autogenerated
• A standard way of laying out sprites in an image file. If this was realized, players could take their avatars with them from one denki guy site to another.
• A menuing extension of the dialogue system that will support decision trees, or even an interaction as complicated buying something from the ubiquitous "shops" that pepper old jrpgs
• An inventory system that uses cookies and/or a database to store an inventory, preferences, avatars, etc.
• Text input for less one sided conversations
• Internationalization in dialogues
• Akihabara reintegration to support more sophisticated npcs, weapons, hud, audio, and non-rpg style games
• Remove reliance on jquery
• A text parser that will automatically generate text to be formatted for dialogues
• Handle browsers without canvas gracefully

If you have any patches, sprites, template levels, or other ideas to share, I would love to hear them!

Cheers,

-Evan