Making an adventure game more 'alive'.

[hedgefield]

I'm a big fan of ideas like this. For my game I've been trying to stuff in all sorts of things that you can do that have nothing to do with the actual story, like get a cup of coffee or turn on a fan, or things that make the enviroment seem alive, like a flickering vending machine and animating NPC's. For a relatively small effort, the payoff can be huge. I always hate it when you have only 2 or 3 things to look at in a room.

And thanks for that suggestion about the Last Express. I had never heard about it, so I checked out the demo. Really fun game, I love how they used rotoscoping for the characters. Just too bad only half the animations are actually continuous.

[Dualnames]

I always liked well written Journals/Diaries in games. It's surprisingly how a few words can make you imagine many things..

[lo_res_man]

Technically it wasn't rotoscoping, it was more like real life cel shading. They gave the actors these wicked makeup jobs, then processed the images to make them look "cel"-ish. I just downloaded the demo, and yes it looks awesome. I think the reason they didn't use all the frames, is well it would have been impossible to fit all the frames on one cd. And disc switching ala riven can throw ME out of a gameworld.

[Renal Shutdown]

Making games seem alive isn't a new theory:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lure_of_the_Temptress
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Theatre

Other games have tried the Day/Night stuff, too.

Like most things, it's down to putting enough in.  The bigger the game, the more effort required.

[hedgefield]

Technically it wasn't rotoscoping, it was more like real life cel shading.

Yeah true, especially on the hair you can clearly see the poster edges filter from photoshop. And good point about the size, it hadn't occured to me.

I'm very interested in the Virtual Theatre engine, not just for the AI but there are also some great graphical features in it like the dynamic walkcycles, the non-blocking conversations and the way they render shadows on characters and objects.

[EldKatt]

Actually they processed the images to conserve only outlines, in black and white, and then coloured them by hand. So it's more like half-automated rotoscoping.

[Grue]

There's also the great-looking Orion Burger (awesome with a walkthrough):

Aha, I have that game, I just need to work out how to get it to load on Microsoft XP though.