AGS ezine issue 5

[Shattered Sponge]

I disagree with you, yufster. Using a way of the described, you could, for example, lengthen your game from 4 to 5 hours or so. And, those tricks work ONLY if the game is worth playing - otherwise the player will throw it away.

Waitasec... are you telling me that article wasn't satire?

[Vel]

Ss, the game was semi-satire.

Yufster and peace man: Did a pixel hunt or a timed sequence ruin the fun of FoA? Or KQ2 VGA? As long as they are not thw WHOLE game, it would be still enjoyable. Did the use recipe on kitchen puzzle ruin BoE? I think not, for the thing that is most important is the plot. I hate it when I play a good game, finish it in an hour, and then say, "was that it"?
I'd prefer it to have a puzzle or two of which I described to lengthen gameplay.

[Meowster]

Did a pixel hunt or a timed sequence ruin the fun of FoA? Or KQ2 VGA?

Yes. It did.

Good puzzles will keep you ages but stay constantly moving. Instead of a Pixel Hunt puzzle to find the Map Pieces in MI, they created sub-puzzles which didn't have to be completed in order. This way, even when you were stuck on one sub-puzzle, you could complete others, and possibly find the answer to the one you were stuck on on your way. This added days and days of gameplay for me, and yet constantly I was moving in the game, progressing slowly and surely. The game spanned for weeks with me, but I was never stuck for more than two days, and even when I was it didn't feel like it because I was still finding items or combinations etc.,. This is good design.

Under a Killing Moon added an entire Three Days of playing time for me, by putting a key that was approximately the size of a human head-hair, and the same colour as the background, on a mantlepiece. To top it off, you had to LOOK DOWN ON THE MANTLEPIECE in order to see the key. Even when you DID look at the Mantlepiece, you still couldn't see it. Besides that, you never had to look down at anything else in the game, and never had to do it again, so you wouldn't think of using that particular command. I did not find that very funny. It was horrificly designed.
You darted through the first three quarters of the game in an hour, got stuck looking for a key for three days, and then finished the rest in about twenty minutes. Bad game design.

Escape from Delirium. Leprosy.

[Vel]

Yuffie, Im half drunk and mostly cant understand what your point is, but EfD wins the worst adventure ever award in my book, and MIs are somewhere in the middle

[Meowster]

Vel, only heathens actually like Pixel Hunting Puzzles. They're the worst, lowest, dirtiest form of a puzzle ever.  

[Vel]

And what about the other 6 ways? Are they ok?

[Bluke4x4]

Did you misspell Yahtzee (In the 5 Days A Stranger review) on purpose?

[Meowster]

I really can't believe you're actually serious about this whole lengthening thing but okay... here's my two cent....

Make the text unskippable
Loads of games actually use this option, because otherwise impatient players could just skip past all the relevant information. Also it helps the music time with cut scenes, where otherwise the player could merely skip the text through. I even use this. I don't do it to lengthen my game, I just prefer it unskippable... PROVIDED YOUR CONVERSATIONS DON'T GO ON AND ON AND ON LIKE DISCWORLDS DID....

Make the character move as a slug
This would make me quit a game in disgust and stamp on it, and then burn it and throw the ashes in the recycle bin, and then drag them out so I could burn them some more before deleting them again.

Make a crappy GUI with 1001 menus or commands
Completely retarded.

. Make a timed puzzle. But not your run-off-the-mill timed puzzle. The kind of timed puzzle that involves fooling around for 10-40 minutes until the thing the player needs appears
Supremely Retarded.

Make an illogical puzzle
Depends on how it is used... the Rubber Chicken with a Pulley in the Middle was great. Completely illogical puzzles can be annoying if used too much.

A really dirty one: make cool background music
Great.

Do not do a map of the region or something. Let the player travel through the beautiful lands of your game!
Depends on how big the beautiful lands are. Could be annoying, could be tactful.

More importantly, I would simply not be worried about making your game long.

[Pumaman]

As a satire, that article is pretty good.

Taking it seriously... well, all I can say is it's given me a couple of new ideas for the Make My Game dialog

[Vel]

You mean its not spelled YATHZEE?

[InCreator]

In my opinion, good adventure game means game that is short only when used a walkthru. But when played without one, player spends a lot of time exploring all possibilities, hotspots and so on. So in my games I'll try to make excactly THAT part to be as entertaining as possible because otherwise It's just frustrating (and we have all seen that, in MANY games, right?). So best way to make game lengthy is to give player wish to try everything -- not to find the solution but to have more fun. Like - when doing something not needed to complete the game, still present player with good jokes or even some nice animations otherwise not seen...
Rob Blanc series make a good example here.

Hmm... reading the article about lengthening your game again, I think you just missed with the title of the article. It should have been "How to act like an amateur adventure maker" or "Seven mistakes beginners usually do" or something  like that...
Anyway, I think criticizm is wrong here and I find that one funny as hell. Maybe AGSezine needs even more humour, because humour has always been strongly related to adventure games and this bring us to a conclusion that makers of these games are pretty humorous people too. Like Al Lowe or something. Just read the topic "how to attract people to my game" in this forum...

AGSezine could be in HTML-format too. I'd like to help and convert these docs, but my machine is way toooo slow to start messing with that... even opening an issue in Word takes 3-4 minutes.

[PeaceMan]

I guess it's my turn to roll:

Make the text unskippable

This extremly is annoying if you can read faster than the text moves. Yes I know that you can miss important information, but isn't that why you careful when you skip text and save regularly?


Make the character move as a slug

Very bad idea. This combined with the wandering through the landscapes idea will make you lose interest at an extremly fast rate.


Make a crappy GUI with 1001 menus or commands

Having a lot of options on a GUI doesn't annoy me as long as it is done right. If the GUI is placed at the bottom of the screen where it is easy to reach and buttons are clearly marked is fine. If it is on a verb coin like "5 Days a Stranger" it will piss me off as it is difficult and time consuming.


Make a timed puzzle. But not your run-off-the-mill timed puzzle. The kind of timed puzzle that involves fooling around for 10-40 minutes until the thing the player needs appears

Annoying. I hate all timed puzzles. Take the Feeble Files. There is a puzzle where you have to escape a guard in a prison cell You have to go through a whole day in the prison until you are in your cell before you can escape. You have to get to certain rooms in the prison while the guard is patrolling and if he catches you, you have to go though a whole day again to get black to your room to start sneaking around again which means you have to skip a load of cutscenes and wait around ten minutes each time before you can start again.


Make an illogical puzzle

It depends on what you mean. If it is something stupid like use the bowl on the ladder then it is annoying. Personally I don't think the rubber chicken puzzle was illogical because it is obvious that you can use a pulley on a rope to slide across it, it was just kind of wacky.


A really dirty one: make cool background music

This is fine as there is no problem with good music in a game. It is up to the player if they want to stand around in one room listening to it.


Do not do a map of the region or something. Let the player travel through the beautiful lands of your game!

I hate pointless rooms in games that have no reason to be there. If there is no reason to a room and you have been wandering around in it for weeks and find out it is not needed you would be annoyed. The use of them as scenery annoys me too if you have played Simon the Sorcerer you will know this. The map builds up each time you visit a place which meand you are wandering around waht can only be called one of the worst things you can have in an adventure game, The Maze. Even when you have most of the places on the map marked out there are still a few that are not so you have to walk to them combined with Simon's slow walking speed this is annoying.

That's what I think.

[Nellie]

I too am surprised to find the article wasn't entirely satirical.

But this looks like fun anyway, so...


Make the text unskippable

Man, I hate this.  I always read faster than the text speed, and it drives me bonkers to have to sit around tapping my fingers waiting for the rest.  As far as the 'missing vital information' aspect of it goes, if a game only gives the player one chance to get that all-important, required-to-solve-the-game information, then it's already strayed into the realm of bad design.


Make the character move as a slug

Aaargh!!  Nellie smashes The Feeble Files into tiny pieces, stamps on the pieces, burns them, then murders everybody at Adventuresoft in several gruesome ways.


Make a crappy GUI with 1001 menus or commands

Actually, I consider a GUI with a wide range of commands to greatly enhance gameplay, providing it is well implemented.  For one thing, text adventures implement many more commands than your average graphic adventure, and the depth of interaction is massively improved as a result.  For a couple of examples of how lots of commands can give you a great game, play Eric the Unready or 2ma2's What Time Is It? demo.  (And where is that sonofabitch nowadays?  I miss him.)


Make a timed puzzle that requires 10-40 minutes fooling around

Eek.  Timed puzzles can be fantastic when done right (ie, the entire endgame of Full Throttle), but to extend one over a couple of minutes is just asking for trouble (or, rather, calling Trouble nasty names then bending over to get your arse kicked).


Make an illogical puzzle

No, no, no, never, never, never.  Avoid like the plague.  If the player can't fairly solve it through intelligence/clues/deduction/imagination/blah, then throw it out.  I also thought the pulley-chicken puzzle was completely logical, even if it was bizarre and random.


Make cool background music

Yeah!


No map - let the player travel

Now then.  Simon the Sorceror 1 was absolutely gorgeous, IMO.  The landscapes and forests were achingly beautiful and had these amazing little background animations that really made you feel like the land was alive with woodland creatures (the stag on the hill was my favourite).  Beautiful, gorgeous, immensely pleasureable to see.

Wandering backwards and forwards through that damn game drove me bonkers.  I actually drew a frigging map to make it faster, and it was still too slow.  It's nice to have a choice to wander through beautiful lands, but to be forced to do it over and over again is taking the p**s.


Anyway, you've certainly got us talking, Vel.  Well done.

[Bluke4x4]

My turn:


Unskippable text

I don't really care about this one. I mean, hey, with the time it takes you to finish reading it, you could do tons of things awaiting the next small line of text that probably just says "What?". Example, do algebra homework, eat pizza, etc.


Move player as slow as a slug

Heh, this reminds me of the Snail Quest games. But seriously, if it takes the player character 5 minutes to walk to one side of the room to the other, the game's trash.

Crappy GUI with lots of menus

I hate this kind of stuff. But, of course, I only encountered it in "5 Days A Stranger". I don't get around much in the adventure game industry.

Timed puzzles

I only like these when it's like, get a hot dog, and you have 10-40 minutes to find it, but it's not hidden or anything.

Illogical puzzles

I don't care about these. Besides, I usually mess up 5 seconds after I realize it's a puzzle I have to solve. So I always use everything I have with everything I have.

Cool music

Awesome.

No map

I strongly disagree. Maps are cool. Besides, if you want to have every room useful and look awesome, the less rooms, the less work.

[Meowster]

Actually, some of the best games IMO had non skippable text and you would barely notice. For example MI2, Sam N Max and I THINK Dott. The thing was you could adjust the speed to suit your reading speed, and also the converations were kept funny and short so you didn't get frustrated. In Discworld, the conversations rambled on and and and since you couldn't skip, it quickly became frustrating.

I think that if a game doesn't allow skipping of speech without annoying the player, this is a good design sign.

[Privateer Puddin']

Lucasarts used    .    to skip text im sure

[Meowster]

Yeah, see, it was so NOT annoying you can't even remember it

Play MI2.

See?

[Privateer Puddin']

i was 5 when i first played MI2.. i didnt understand half of it first time through so

[MrColossal]

i skipped quite a lot of the monkey island text and sam and max and dott... there's only so many times you can read a global message on two inventory items not working together

i think the most i've skipped is under a killing moon...

"This arboretum is..."
"This arboretum is..."
"This ar..."
"This ar..."
etc

and vel, i dunno if anyone has told you this before but you can create a downloadable issue that is in html format, just zip it and biff pow, someone can download it and view it like a webpage and maintain the "issue"ness that you want to keep. i can't view the word files cause i don't have an updated version, and any links you have in the pdf version don't work.

and i do believe an html version would be a much smaller file size

eric

[GarageGothic]

I can't believe that article wasn't entirely satirical. Sure, long games are nice - but only because they have more content, not because they waste more of my time! What's next, an article by James Cameron teaching us to pad out a 2 hour movie to 4 hours running time?