WME architecture

WME design is strictly object oriented. You build your game by creating several types of “objects” and connecting them together using the application logic. You manage your game objects using the ProjectMan tool.

The most commonly used objects are:

Scenes – Your game consists of several scenes, these are the “rooms”, the world, or the environment where your game takes place. You create the scenes using the SceneEdit tool.

Actors – Actors are the characters appearing in your game. You’ll usually have one main actor (the main hero, controlled by the player) and possibly several other actors (NPC’s – non-player characters).

Entities – Entities are generic interactive or non-interactive objects in your game world. The scenes are built of entities (you can think of the entities as of the theatre properties). You can also use entities to make simple characters, which don’t walk (normally you’d use an actor object to create a game character, but as long as the character doesn’t walk, it much simpler to use an entity instead).

GUI objects – WME allows you to create simple graphical user interface elements, such as windows, with buttons and fill-in fields. You can use those to design your game’s user interface, like save/load windows, game settings, in-game menus etc.

Fonts – WME uses either graphical (bitmap) fonts or TrueType fonts to display captions, subtitles, GUI elements etc. You can create your own fonts matching your game’s graphical style.

Sprites – A “sprite” is the basic graphical element used in WME. It can be either a static image or an animation. The sprites are used to build up the other complex objects such as actors and entities. You can create the sprites using the SpriteEdit tool.

But your game is really brought to life by the scripts. The scripts are simple programs, which provide the actual game logic. You can attach the scripts to the objects and those scripts can be than executed when a certain event occurs. WME uses its own scripting language, which is actually a simplified version of JavaScript. If you are already familiar with JavaScript you shouldn’t have problems writing your own WME scripts.