Welcome to the Tiny and Big cinema! A good story based game needs cutscenes. That’s the reason why we are developing a scriptable scenario feature for Tiny and Big. Our goal is to provide an easy to handle script, which can be used by our stage directors who have little experience in programming. For example they would like to say: “Hey TINY, go to the position where the red marker is and be quick on the draw. BIG, you have to look scary and curse ‘What the heck …’, wait two seconds and then run away.”

Okay, this is maybe a bit too abstract, but I think you got the Idea. The scenario author should implement simple instructions with a minimum of programming language complexity. These instructions will be inserted into a task scheduler and will be executed at the desired time.

Let’s take a look at a very simple example.

scenario.time = 2.0 Timestamp when to start with the following tasks

scenario:lookAtActor(Actor.TINY, 3.0) Camera shall look to TINY within 3 sec

scenario:move(Actor.CAMERA, “nav_point_1”, 3.0) Move camera to navigation point 1 within 3 sec

scenario.time = 3.5

scenario:playAnimation(Actor.TINY, “arm”) TINY shall play the arm animation

scenario.time = 6.0

scenario:cameraTarget(Actor.TINY) Sets TINY as fixed camera target

scenario.time = 7.0

scenario:move(Actor.CAMERA, “nav_point_2”, 2.0) Move camera to navigation point 2 within 2 sec

scenario.time = 8.5

scenario:playAnimation(Actor.TINY, “unarm”) TINY shall play the unarm animation

scenario.time = 10.0

scenario:endCutscene()

The following video shows the result of the scenario script. The cutscene begins once the red bars come down.