When players reach some specific quest event trigger points, available quests will be listed for the player to choose to accept them. The straightforward way to trigger the quest is through the conversation with NPCs. While chatting with NPCs, they may require the players to archive some tasks. For example, a farmer may ask players to buy some seeds in the other town; a solider may ask players to kill a monster in order to get into the castle.
Besides triggering quests from NPCs, quests can also be triggered from reading documents, collecting items, or completing a quest. We will discuss them one by one.
In the last chapter, we created the NPC conversation system which is able to dispatch specific event when the player reaches that conversation node. We will make use of this feature to dispatch the quest triggering event.
When we design the conversation, a quest_list_panel event will be dispatched somewhere.
_conversation[5].action = "quest_list_panel";
The Panels class will then catch the event and display the quest-listing panel. We are going to create this quest-listing panel in the next section.
stage.addEventListener("quest_list_panel",onDisplayQuestListPanel);
In the environment, there may be some poster stuck on the wall or some paper documents put up on the desk. Players may be able to read the content inside those documents when they walk near by and click on them. This can be done by checking the player's position and dispatching an event to trigger the document reading. The content of these documents may be just telling some facts or they can be a starting point of the quest. For example, if players read the wanted poster on wall, a people hunting mini game may be launched.
Players may be able to collect items on the ground. Some of these items may contain special quests. A player may pick up a mystery key that triggers the quest of finding the treasure or a rubbish paper that contains a secret of a mad scientist.
Sometimes, quests can be chained together to composite a large mission. A new quest appears when a player finishes a quest in the chain. The new quest is usually a continuation of the last quest for the player to explore the next part of the story. This is also called Quest Chain.
The following graphs shows how a quest is disabled until the pre-requirement is fulfilled:
We have discussed some basic quests concepts and we will move on to setting up quests in our virtual world.