World building and data dumping in an adventure game.

[Calin Leafshade]

If an adventure game is set in some environment other than plain old present day earth there is some world building to be done. Certain concepts need to be explained to the player and there's a lot of peripheral info that the player might like to be aware of but is not plot-critical.

My question is what good ways are there to give this information to the player? Long dialogue sequences (especially non-interactive ones) are rightfully frowned upon by players so how else can we explain things to the player without boring them and without requiring them to go at read some book in an in-game library or something.

[Ali]

A practical option is some kind of failure or change in the every day running of normal life, which the player has to put right. Putting things back as they should be introduces the player step-by-step to how the world of the game operates. Like powering up the ship at the start of Primordia.

[selmiak]

universally readable signs as in machinarium are a good solution. Also you don't have to translate the game when you use signs to transport some information.
Or you write interesting dialogs that subtely explain the information and still are intersting and don't read like they are written especially to tell that piece of information. When the dialog is interactive asking for specific topics and delivering the answer is still usefull though. Or the answer is a puzzle already.

[nihilyst]

Depends on the kind of world and the rules you want to establish, I guess. I liked Full Throttle, because it didn't overwhelm the player with endless dialogue to establish its world, yet it still managed to convey the image of its dystopian setting just by details: the red-and-purple colour scheme, the opposition of oldschool bikers vs hover-car driving business men, the music etc.
Or The Dig. You somehow "get" the world just via the design choices.

It's the same way Ben304's games work. You might not know what the world is like, but you feel it, and that, to me, is more important.

[Daniel Eakins]

An easy way to convey how something is done in the game's world is to show another character do it first. The player observes them in a cutscene or the background and then has to imitate them. This can be a puzzle, but not necessarily.