Prosecutor
Gender: Male
Rank: Decisive Witness
Joined: Mon Jan 07, 2008 12:47 pm
Posts: 274
n working on my fancase,
All the Brooks and Soldiers, I kept running into the limitations of Ace Attorney Online (AAO). Not because AAO is inadequate - far from it! AAO can do pretty much any reasonable thing you'd want to do. The same goes for PyWright, which is also quite full-featured.
But I'm not doing reasonable things, and I wanted to learn more programming!
Suppose you want to embed elaborate Professor Layton-style puzzles, have smooth 3D object rotations, or otherwise extend the base idea of an "AA game." You can do some of that in PyWright, AAO, or even Ren'Py, but it'd be nice to have a framework that's a more open to extension in ambitious ways.
That brings me to UCANT.
What is UCANT?In a few words: An Adventure VN engine for people who like to program, but also like having tools to make that easier. I would say it's harder to use than the existing casemakers (PyWright, AAO, and PWLib), but it does have some conveniences, especially when it comes to making custom user interfaces.
Where is it now?Not complete, that's for sure. My first goal is to get UCANT in a position where it has all of the features needed for my AA fancase, including some special engines. I currently have an investigation gameplay demo, but still need to implement trial features (cross-examine) and a lot of conveniences.
On the other hand, a lot of progress has been made, as the demo below should show!
InfluencesUCANT owes a major debt of inspiration to the casemakers that have come before. I've scripted in PyWright and made Ace Attorney Online cases, and UCANT is, in many ways, written based on those experiences. For example, the way UCANT uses the right side of the screen is highly influenced by Ace Attorney Online.
UCANT is also influenced by some text adventure authoring tools (Ink, Inform 7), as well as Ren'Py.
Gameplay Demo:Here are simple demos of investigation gameplay, in zipped archives:
PC version (Updated June 1, 2018)
Mac version (Updated June 1, 2018)
Your computer may not recognize these executables as safe. On a Mac, you may need to control-click the unzipped archive to actually run it.
Unity Asset Package:If you'd like to mess around with UCANT, here's an asset package that can be imported into version 2018.1 or later of the Unity Editor:
Asset PackageFor now, you really need to know how Unity works to have any chance of using this, but documentation is on its way. I'll have that posted once I've gotten it into readable shape. For now, making a game in UCANT would probably be an exercise in frustration and/or careful imitation of the demo.
---
I'd be glad to hear any comments or suggestions! As this is something of a hobby project - I'm not a professional programmer at any level - I'm sure people with more experience will have good ideas.
Last edited by FerdieLance on Fri Jun 01, 2018 9:59 pm, edited 5 times in total.