Spritekit NPC quests & scripting in general

Question

I'm in the process of developing an RPG using Apples SpriteKit framework. All is well: I have NPC & game objects all that the player can interact with. Plus, I have a text box to display text. Now, I want to implement quests & such but I'm currently stumped on figuring out a good way to create such game content. I did come across Ray Wenderlich's tutorial (https://www.raywenderlich.com/30561/how-to-make-a-rpg) on making an RPG and using Lua as the scripting language of choice, but after trial & error, I realized the luaObjectiveC bridge is far too old & deprecated (not sure how to fix the myraid of defects & errors) & there aren't any viable counter alternatives. I tried looking in github but couldn't find anything useful to get me started. Thus, I realize I must code my own implementation from scratch.

Any suggestions/tips for how to go about solving this process? Should I have some sort of JSON file that stores dialogue text which is called upon & has appropriate content retrieved & displayed inside the text box? I'm hoping to make this a more-or-less flexible solution so I can use it in future projects.

Answer 1

If you are just starting your game now, go ahead and start using the iOS 10 Tile interface for world construction. See this raywenderlich tutorial for more. The tile interface handles constructing the world and the performance of tile based rendering for you. You still need to implement the game logic, items, and so on. JSON is just as good as any other storage means. You are going to need to implement dialog logic yourself. I would also suggest that you have a peek at my texture memory reduction framework which is very useful for loading complex images that would otherwise consume a ton of texture memory.