What Constitues a Commercial Grade Adventure?

[Greg Squire]

This is a very subjective question, but I'd like to hear some other  opinions. Here's the question.  In your mind, what constitues a Commercial Grade Adventure Game?  In other words, what kind of quality and other criteria is needed in a 2D point and click game to be of "Commercial Quality"?

There's a few things that I can think of that are factors in this, such as:
Length of the game (How long is long enough?)
Usability of the GUI (is it "Intuative" enough to use?)
Quality of the graphics (How good is good enough?)
Quality of the music/sound (MIDI's probably out nowdays, unless you are going for retro feel)
Quality of the story (what about a story is needed to pull the player in)
Quality of the puzzles (There's a balance between too hard and too simple)
Quality of the Voice Acting (are voices needed in a commercial quality game?  I'd tend to think "Yes")

What's everyone's opinion?  I don't want to get into a discussion about commercial versus freeware, as I know that's been discussed a lot already.  Just what would be needed in a game in order for you to be willing to pay money for it?

[SpacePirateCaine]

There are a lot of things that are going to factor in to whether people are going to be willing to pay for a product or not. There are examples of both successes and failures to achieve this goal coming out of our community.

The first thing that you're likely to come across is the cost of your product - its implied value, if you will. As a developer, of course, we know that there's a whole lot of work that goes into these projects, time, energy and our own personal resources that may very well cause us to believe that a product is worth more than many consumers would be willing to pay for. In today's game market (casual and otherwise), the general trend is towards focusing on accessibility and total play value (initial experience, replay value, total amount of time that someone is willing to spend on the game itself).

As the adventure game is a by and large niche genre now, it's harder to really market them to a wide audience. We have had the benefit of companies like Telltale bringing them slightly back into the mainstream with releases like Sam & Max and the Homestar Runner (Strong Bad) games, but retro itself is a dubious selling point - these commercial releases are reasonably sized and utilize relatively newer technology.

I'm not sure, honestly, how much people are really going to pay for something. If it's going by the episodic format that seems to be cropping up a whole lot recently, think somewhere in the range of $5 USD, and a full length game probably is going to suffer if charging more than $20 USD. This is my own opinion, of course, and it may be very useful to hear from people like Dave Gilbert and the Herculean Effort guys to get an insight into the real current market.

To answer each of your criterion as listed in the first post, I'd say you want a game that people 'speedrunning' would play for at least half an hour, perhaps longer. But content preceeds length, of course - a well-written story that is engaging even in a short period of time, may well still be worth it.

For GUI usability, this is actually a slightly complicated issue. In the hardcore adventure gaming community (i.e. us), people are very picky about the GUI. Intuitive is hard to accomplish, and you're often bound to run into people who complain about your interface no matter how you slice it. The general wish is to be able to innovate - reinvent the wheel and have something that's both easy and fun to use, but it's often the case that people will get frustrated with an alien new control scheme, so I would suggest the KISS principle (Keep it Simple, Stupid). For this very reason, with my current project, Kuma Story, I developed the user interface to include only 2 interactions: Move & Interact. This does mean that I can't be as creative (in a manner of speaking) with descriptions or dialogue, since I'm not including any, but it will be more accessible to non-adventure-gamers.

Quality of Audio/Video: Of course, the nicer the better - AGS has limitations (It's not a 3D engine), so you're likely not going to be making another Sam & Max: Freelance Police (though 'Hit The Road' is a possibility). But very well drawn high resolution graphics are a possibility (and likely to get the best reception). That said, people do pay for games that still have retro, low-res graphics. I can't vouch for it, but I imagine that if the story's good enough, even ultra-retro EGA graphics could be viable. Your sound should match your video, though. It wouldn't feel right to have a beautifully rendered orchestral soundtrack on a game that looked like the original release of King's Quest 1.

Voice acting, I honestly don't think is a big deal. Sure, it's nice, but there are times when it will work against you. Good voice acting can give more incentive to buy, but bad voice acting makes an otherwise polished game feel bad. If you're going to take the voice acting route, make sure that your actors all do good jobs, are convincing, record quality audio (No hissing, no pops) and have consistent quality in all audio. Otherwise it starts to sound messy. The human brain has a much easier time processing disjointed visual than audio - it's like watching a TV with a blurry or slightly staticky screen versus a TV with sound cut-outs. Sound makes something nearly unwatchable.

Story is very subjective, and probably the hardest really to quantify. The only suggestion I can give you there is to think it through very deeply, make sure you have a cohesive plot, few if any plot holes, a story that people would be interested in learning about, and be sure to have others read through your work and critique it. Because an extra set of eyes and ears will always catch things that you don't.

[Jared]

Hmm, it's hard to gauge now, isn't it?

I bought the Runaway games. In terms of design, they are a long way short of fantastic. In fact, the puzzle design is truly awful in the first game. BUT characters are entertaining and the story is quite engaging as they go - plus production values are high. It looks and feels professional (although gameplay is inferior to many titles on this site) and is fun. I buy it.

I bought Gilbert Goodmate and the Mushroom of Phungoria. The animation is choppy, the voice acting is probably slightly subpar and the cutscenes are very amateur. But the price is low, the background graphics are gorgeous with wonderful music and it's a big game with a lot of crazy characters. Plus, the developers were very up front about being amateurs and trying to keep the game alive so I supported them.

I am going to buy (And I hope I get this right..) Resonance by Vince Twelve (That's right, isn't it?) The graphics are very low resolution, I don't really know the storyline, characters or any idea of what the final experience will be. But I read the blog posts and you think "This guy knows what needs to go into a game!" My mind is made up that this will definitely be a must play.

I didn't even consider DOWNLOADING Simon the Sorcerer 4. Seeing it wasn't by Adventure Soft raised my eyebrow. And then I watched a trailer. Horrible, horrible voice acting that misses the point of the characters and completely unintelligible translation to boot. Graphics were gorgeous. Really outstanding. But they could never, ever be good enough to make that game attractive to me.

Simon the Sorcerer 3D on the other hand has terrible graphics, clumsy interface and can barely even be called a 'stable' build of a game, ranking as one of the buggiest play experiences I've ever had. But great story, fun puzzles, all my favourite characters and a LOT of laughs. I rank that as a great gaming experience, and I even got quite upset at the end. (In a good way)

It isn't a case of everything needing to be up to a certain standard. But the mean quality adding up to a certain level, IMHO.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

I am going to buy (And I hope I get this right..) Resonance by Vince Twelve (That's right, isn't it?) The graphics are very low resolution, I don't really know the storyline, characters or any idea of what the final experience will be.

I guess that depends on what you define as 'very low resolution'.  Are you talking about the physical resolution, which is 320x240, or the graphical resolution, which is 16 bit for the backgrounds and 8 bit for the sprites? 

[Dave Gilbert]

This is what I always tell people who ask me this question.  Don't worry about what makes a game commercial.  Just make the game!  You'll make mistakes, but so what?  That's how you learn.  Just remember to keep things simple and try not to get mega ambitious on your first project. 

There's no criteria or formula for what makes a commercial game.   Heck, by most standards my first commercial adventure game, the Shivah, should have stayed freeware.  The game was pretty short and the graphics were very simple.  I only spent a few months working on it, but that enabled me to test the waters without a huge investment.  I made lots of mistakes when I sold Shivah commercially, but I was able to bounce back pretty easily since I hadn't invested a lot of time and money into it.  Plus I learned a whole bunch from the process.  I still make mistakes, but the process gets streamlined each time.

[Greg Squire]

Thanks guys.   I agree that you don't want to "bite off more than you can chew", so your advice is very relevent Dave.  It's always best to shoot for something achievable and then hit it, rather than shoot for the moon and then miss it.

[EnterTheStory (aka tolworthy)]

On an abstract level, I'd say, offer something people want, but they can't get without paying you. That's what I'm aiming for. Something that's really. really different.

Dave Gilbert is right. It's the same advice to any new business - expect to make mistakes, and expect it to take a very long time.

Like Dave, I sold my first game commercially, and like him I made plenty of mistakes. But I ignored the common sense advice of starting small. I'm aiming for the moon, and then some. It took ten years of planning before the first version of my game came out, and it will take at least another five years before I have a version that says what I really want it to say.

If you want to follow in the footsteps of other commercial games then I guess your game needs to look and play like theirs. But if you want to really break out and do something amazing, you need to be different. And have a huge, huge, HUGE amount of insane blind dedication.

Just my 2c

PS in the short to medium term - the first five years at least - you'll always make more money by flipping burgers at McDonalds.