I’ve been working on a modular event system for our photography game for the last few weeks. The whole thing is broken into a few components:

Event:

The event as a whole. Has references to the trigger, actions, and conditions, as well as some parameters to modify how the event plays out.

ie: reversable, simultaneous, loopable

Triggers:

A physical node in the scene that fires a signal for the event.

ie: an area, a timer, an interactable

Actions:

One or more resources that execute sequentially or simultaneously once the trigger fires.

ie: move a target, play an animation, change camera

Conditions:

One or more resources that must be true for the actions to execute.

ie: player state, time of day, has key

All the components are put together in the editor, so once you have the components programmed out it’s a breeze to set up new events. Because of the simplicity of the system, making new components is very as well, with each one being just a few lines of code. I don’t think performance would be much of an issue, but I also made the conscious decision to make actions and conditions resources so that the scene doesn’t get bogged down with too many nodes.

There isn’t going to be a ton more interactions for our game so what I’ve got here works great. I’ve also played around with using it for our wild animals AI, replicating a sort of behavior tree pattern.

Anyways, I’ve thrown together a quick demo video! Please let me know what you think, and feel free to ask questions if you want to know more.