For what I've seen, I think that DOTT had 50 BGs for the game and like 27 for the cutscenes:
http://imgur.com/a/nGMpt/all I'd like to know more about the number of BGs and characters in those old lucasart & sierra games (perhaps I should ask in those remake-teams?)
I think the last Broken Sowrd had much less than that, probably since it's half a game. I wonder how many BGs & CH would be average for an episodic game?
...Did somebody study this subject a little further and can share some info?
Using Scumm Rev (a SCUMM ripping tool), I see that
Monkey Island 2 has a total of 109 rooms, including cutscenes, title cards, closeups, hidden rooms and so on.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade has 93.
Zac McKracken has 57.
I don't have the data files of other LucasArts games on my PC just right now, so I can't tell about them.
I counted for our project that Fate of Atlantis has around 80 to 90 ( imgur.com/a/jNECF#0 ). I'ma ctually very surprised that DotT has only 50. Fair play to them, it means they densified the puzzles into only few locations.
A Tale of Two Kingdoms has 64 rooms. Heroine's Quest has 103, not counting the generic forest/cave rooms (which are technically all the same room :) ). Note that some rooms have multiple backgrounds, and that some backgrounds are actually GUIs instead of rooms, bringing the total amount of backgrounds to 125.
My game, "Donald Dowell", has about 80 "playable rooms". Totally it has 107 rooms, including cutscenes, closeups, intro and so on.
In terms of an episodic game, I would guess at about 15-25 locations and 10-15 characters, if you're looking at something along the lines of TellTale's episodic games.
I'm surprised Zak McKraken has so few locations relatively - though I guess there's a lot of duplication of rooms in several locations - it felt like such a huge game when I played it as a kid. I'll try to come back to this thread when I actually know how many screens Captain Disaster in Death Has A Million Stomping Boots will have in total. I think Act I has 23 locations and 16 characters atm (not including cue cars, cut scenes etc.).
The original Simon the Sorcerer stands out with 203 unique backgrounds ( 8-0 ). To be fair, some of them are swapped around in the maze-like forest and have neither puzzles nor interactive objects, they are just there to look awesome.
Quote from: Ghost on Fri 28/02/2014 13:59:29
The original Simon the Sorcerer stands out with 203 unique backgrounds.
That's quite some figure. Anyone know what the
highest number of backgrounds in a single adventure game is?
I suppose that depends on your definition of "background" and of "adventure game" :grin: Does Planescape: Torment count?
The Cat Lady has about 175 rooms. Some are close-ups and stuff, so it's not all walkable rooms;)
Resonance has a total of 77 "Rooms" but most of them are closeups, puzzles, or variations of the same room (day/night). There are actually only 31 different walkable backgrounds if you don't count day/night/paintover versions of the same room (the five basement maintenance closets were one room, for instance).
I thought a lot about how I could reuse rooms and assets to get the most bang for my buck from my background artist. I think it actually kept the game tighter, as well.
To generalize: I'd say most "full-length" games have at least 50 backgrounds, with an average of 70 to 90.
Quote from: CaptainD on Fri 28/02/2014 14:42:51
Anyone know what the highest number of backgrounds in a single adventure game is?
Nope, but when I typed the question into google, THIS THREAD was in the Top Ten.
I bet it's going to be one of those really old hybrid Text/Graphics adventures by Legend. They had a shitload of locations as a rule.
Interesting, Vince, that such a big game uses quite a low amount of rooms.
I counted the rooms for TSP, and it has 48 unique locations that a player character can move around and operate in. Another 3 are fully drawn and have walkable areas, but no player control. Another 5 or so rooms are sceneries or background images purely for cutscenes. Then a handfull of non-location rooms (close ups and interiors) although most puzzle close ups are handled with guis. Then a couple of rooms for splash screen and credits. 67 rooms all in all.
A third of the locations have day/night variations, bringing up the total amount of image files necessary for the rooms to well over a hundred, although ofc many of these are just variations.
Just noticed this thread.
An interesting discussion. My game, Adventure Island, made with AGS uses a total of 238 AGS rooms, though a lot of these are for titles, close-up views, etc. The breakdown is below:
Titles, Credits, Inventory, etc. = 6;
Close-up views = 50;
First person section views = 70;
Third person rooms = 112.
It took me quite a while to create all these. :-\
Why use rooms for close ups, it always bugged me as a no-no. Primordia used one room for close up, and I'll always be marked for life. I believe number of rooms 60 or so.
Quote from: Dualnames on Thu 13/03/2014 06:16:32
Why use rooms for close ups, it always bugged me as a no-no.
Why not? I think it's the easiest way to do it. I don't like AGS GUIs much.
It's just a choice. The games' creator can use whatever method that is feasible and most suitable for presentation.
Maybe instead we can talk about the number of interactive rooms here.
A close-up can still be interactive. Or do you mean having a walkable area? This would exclude all first person adventures.
What I meant, of course, included those interactive close-ups as well. Maybe I didn't phrase my words precisely. What I meant was to not count those that were used in cutscenes.
Quote from: Dualnames on Thu 13/03/2014 06:16:32
Why use rooms for close ups, it always bugged me as a no-no. Primordia used one room for close up, and I'll always be marked for life. I believe number of rooms 60 or so.
I probably wouldn't use separate rooms if I didn't have to… but in 320x200, there isn't much you can fit on the screen anyway. For instance, there was no way I could fit the whole table of elements into anything smaller than the entire screen, so using a GUI wouldn't make much sense. I mean, using a GUI that covers the entire screen instead of a separate room would be more a matter of principles than anything else.
Quote from: Andail on Sun 09/03/2014 08:43:34
Interesting, Vince, that such a big game uses quite a low amount of rooms.
When you're paying for each one rather than drawing them all yourself, you think long and hard about your background economy! I cut a bunch of corners, like deciding to have the city archives inside the police station instead of having a whole new location, or using the same room for the cemetery cutscene and as the view of the burning lab at the beginning, or using the baseball field as a catch-all to combine a few other rooms that weren't really necessary.
Since I did most of the closeup backgrounds myself, I was more liberal with them, which led to the large number of contained closeup puzzles.
Quote from: Dualnames on Thu 13/03/2014 06:16:32
Why use rooms for close ups, it always bugged me as a no-no. Primordia used one room for close up, and I'll always be marked for life. I believe number of rooms 60 or so.
If it's a non-interactive closeup, especially a closeup of an inventory item or something that the player might be able to look at while standing anywhere in any room, a GUI or overlay might work better. But for stuff with interactive puzzles (Tortoise's puzzle box, locker key magnet mini-game, re-wiring the fire door panel) it made more sense to use a room. For one thing, the player will always be standing in the same place when they access the closeup, so there's no confusion about where to place the player when they return from the closeup. It also allows you to keep all your code for the closeup puzzle contained in a single room script instead of creating it's own script module and cluttering up that list.
It's just a judgement call.
I used a number of rooms as close-ups because many of then had interaction on them, including some close-ups from close-ups! I did also use objects for pop-up close-ups on over 40 of my rooms, but where the close-up needed to fill the whole screen there seemed no point in making it an object rather than another room. In my case, the number of rooms was governed by what I wanted the game to show rather than any other considerations.
I know it's a judgment call, of course it is, just for some weird reason, I always preferred to use GUIs, and I found myself surprised to see everyone(the majority at least) is using rooms. That's all. I found the fact that I can close a UI and not reallign the room as it were, easier than actually doing so.
Not every one is accustomed to every feature of the engine and they need not be. Anyone can use whichever method which is easier to them or more comfortable to work with. Using rooms is easy for most people. You just import the background and do the necessary scripting.
Moreover, because of how things work(for AGS at least), room backgrounds compress much better than sprites, so it actually reduces the game's size if you use rooms instead of importing a number of sprites. IMO this is a big advantage.