The Big Whoop School of Adventure Gamery

[magintz]

What's this I hear coming in from across the Internet, a school of adventure gamery? Well, hold your metaphorical horses and I'll answer your questions.

This sounds great, whatever it is, and I'm only about none percent sure what you're on about
I'm hoping to start a blog-esque style online course for learning to write good, wholesome adventure games - everything from how to architect puzzles and good story-telling as well as tips on writing enthralling dialogue. Now this doesn't necessarily have to be adventure games but I feel it's a good place to start.

That sounds like a lot of work, can't you just use what's already out there
There are currently plenty of tutorials out there for art and code but nothing on the fundamentals of a good game design document; which is something I've realised in my ongoing pursuit to create the Adventure Games Design Document Tool: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=45944.0. I wanted to learn a lot of this stuff myself and so I thought I'd formalise it in a structured way to share all my learnings. I also thought it'd be a great way to get some of the AGS seniors to share with everyone their tools of the trade whether it's someone talking about dialogue writing or even how to manage your time. I'll also try to incorporate the talks from last years and this years AdventureX into the mix. There'll even be tips on good code and artwork, but those will be more abstract and theoretical.

Why tell us now if there's nothing yet?
I'm gauging interest and waiting for feedback, which you can either leave on the website below or reply to this thread. If there isn't enough interest I'll abandon hope Hopefully the feedback will allow me to decide what should be in a lesson plan for the academic semester (the stuff you and I want to learn).

Now, if only you had a website
I do, and it's filled with all this information and more! http://bigwhoop.omgaz.co.uk/
Follow this link for all the information, submit ideas of what you would like to learn or offer your services as a lesson teacher. I whipped this up yesterday morning as a little web-design/coding experiment and to show you what this blog/site could look like if it gets the support.

[Babar]

I heartily support this!
When I was looking up stuff online for the actual writing/story portion of my megatutorial (selfpromotion http://babar.uoou.info ), aside from a puzzle tutorial from Rodekill (and some other tutorials which basically categorised and "explained" different kinds of puzzles), I didn't really find anything specifically meant for the MAKING of games or adventure games, so I had to go towards tutorials online on writing and creating characters and stuff focused on story-writing. This should really be very useful to fill that void.

I'd offer my services, but I don't think I have the experience required, and I'd probably just end up grumbling about all the things that designers do today that I find irritating and washed up and unoriginal, rather than offering better solutions.

But yeah...something on puzzle-design as a subset of driving the story forward (as opposed to "I am making an adventure game, I've completed the story, now it needs puzzles, so I shall think up some puzzles!").
Also, maybe not directly related to Adventure Gamery, but something on publicising and promoting your game.

[KodiakBehr]

I lack the skills to contribute, but this sounds like a terrific resource that I'd love to take advantage of.  I hope some of the more talented members of the community buy into it.

[m0ds]

Best of luck Gary, could be interesting, fo sho! Really hoping to include a variety of 20 minute masterclasses at this years AX so perhaps you could come and put this idea forward (and plug it). One module should be "How to finish a game." You can quote FoY on that but I'll quote Zero Hero right back at ya

[ThreeOhFour]

This sounds interesting. It's a very easy topic to write about, but difficult to write about well. I hope it all goes ahead!

[Stupot]

This has my seal of approval

[Radiant]

And mine!

[Miguel R. Fervenza]

I wrote an introduction to adventure puzzles (75000 characters) in Spanish (adventure puzzle concept -like an integrated narrative element-, types of puzzles with simple examples -no spoilers-, coherence, advices, issues and ways to fix them...). It is bigger and deeper than the other articles/documents I found in Internet (the links are at the end of the document), but the puzzle is a huge topic (for books and books), so it's only an introduction. Obviously my English isn't good enough for translating it, if you find somebody to do it, you can use it.

[magintz]

Thanks all for your encouragement so far.

This sounds interesting. It's a very easy topic to write about, but difficult to write about well. I hope it all goes ahead!

I think this is definitely the big thing here. I think if I take my time, plan it all out and do my research it will come together nicely. I have a wealth of experienced guys on the forum here that I can troll for information and consolidate their thoughts into one, coherent place.

I wrote an introduction to adventure puzzles (75000 characters) in Spanish (adventure puzzle concept -like an integrated narrative element-, types of puzzles with simple examples -no spoilers-, coherence, advices, issues and ways to fix them...). It is bigger and deeper than the other articles/documents I found in Internet (the links are at the end of the document), but the puzzle is a huge topic (for books and books), so it's only an introduction. Obviously my English isn't good enough for translating it, if you find somebody to do it, you can use it.

Thanks, Google Translate can convert pdfs. I'll try to make sense of it I also had a look at the French forums and there's a lot of helpful content there as well.

As for professional resources I have the Grim Fandango GDD as well as the others that were posted around the net. There's the Broken Sword GDD documents coming as part of the Kickstarter pack and the double-fine Kickstarter videos are also a great resource.

I'm a member of the IGDA here in London. I'll have to go along to those meetings more and ask those guys for advice and help as well.

It's late, I'm tired and ill. BEDTIME

[Paul Franzen]

Just adding in my support! Any new resource that helps hone people's skills and build better games gets a big thumbs up from me. Maybe see if you can get some of the super-successful AGSers like Dave Gilbert to share their secrets?