ABSTRACT
A crucial step in designing a quest is to map out the steps that the player must undertake to move the quest forward. Flowcharting has the added benefit of requiring the designer to think in terms of logical progression in ways that will transfer naturally into programming, both in the traditional sense of textual commands typed into a compiler and in the more general sense of visual programming, such as that done in Fungus. Quest stages tend to be associated with challenges and overcoming challenges. In a fetch quest, a character must find a valuable, often magical object and return it to an NPC for a reward. Quest games require players to acquire active skills at virtual combat rather than making them spectators to another character’s violence. The challenges of quest games are woven together into a network of rules, tasks, and storylines called a quest system, which is managed technologically by programming within an engine, known as scripting.
