I'm a hapless noob largely inexperienced with Adventure Games as a medium. I played the shareware version of Commander Keene when I was little, and Sam & Max about ten years after its release. Recently I stumbled across 5 Days a Stranger, et al., and I decided to download AGS and give it a go.
The problem is, I wasn't into computers back when Adventure Games were big. They kinda missed me. So now every time I play one, I'm looking at it from the perspective of a post-Sierra gamer. I have lots of questions about Adventure Games, both as a medium for external ideas, and as an art form unto itself. I've been told "you just have to play a lot of adventure games, then you'll get it." And while that certianly is true, I think I could bennefit from getting your points of view on some things.
Off the top of my head:
How important is it to include seperate "look," "talk," and "hands" commands? I've always thought these were kinda superfluous. I mean, you always open doors. You always talk to people. You always pick up usable items. You always examine meaningless background elements, never anything more. So, what's wrong with a one-click interface? Now, I've heard the argument that a single-click interface would reduce the game to button-hunting, and I can kinda see their point, but I could also argue that existing LucusArts-style games are already a talkable-hunt, grabbable-hunt, or lookable-hunt. Only, instead of clicking on everything in the room, you're performing 3 different flavors of clicks on everything in the room. Since most of those clicks end up being dead-ends (It doesn't respond / You can't take that with you) or red herrings (It's a chair. This one's blue.) I would argue that using the sierra-style 3-click system just because it's availible is a cheesy way of making the gameplay take longer. The MAJOR exception to this, of course, is the ACTUAL sierra games, especially (in my mind) Sam & Max, where I was eagerly scouring the room with all 3 click types, because I quickly realized there was comedic gold stashed away under every single rock and shrub.
Do I really need to worry about the 286s in the audience? I was reading through the FAQ and my blood practically went cold when I read the Q&A about why fancy-schmancy 32-bit games won't work on a 286. I started to panic. People are still running those? Where do they find the parts?
A friend has assured me that it's not as bad as all that. That the question was only there to make the FAQ complete. I figured I'd ask for a show of hands anyway, though. If I made a game at 800x600, would you be unable to play it? If the game was 10MB, would you be unable to download it?
How comfortable are you with me tainting the Adventure Game format with other genres? I've seen the AGS Mahjong, the AGS Poker, the AGS Sh'mup. It actually reminds me of my brief affair with PlayFKiss. I see lots of experimentation here, trying to push the software beyond the scope of its original design. Would you folks download games like that? Would you buy them? Or would you much rather buy a higher-rez Mahjong or Card game, built on some other, more general-purpose engine?
Let's agree that Adventure Games are NOT dead. Which would you prefer: nostalgia, or continued advancement of the genre? Another way of phrasing this question might be "Do shiny pre-rendered Adventure Games miss the point completely?" Recent big-budget attempts to revive the genre have historically failed in a commercial sense, but my hope is that a well-crafted adventure game could still stand on its own in the Casual Games market, or perhaps even as donation-ware. But my intention is to use modern graphics, modern resolutions, and perhaps even a modern gamer's mindset when creating them. How does this statement make you feel? Be honest.
LucusArts-style trumped the verb-clouds, the verb-clouds trumped the type-ins, type-ins trumped the text-onlys. Are you interested in seeing something new trump Sierra-style, or would such a game be a blasphemous offense to everything that Adventure Games once stood for?
Thanks in advance! I hope I didn't offend anybody with this post. I am a complete newcomer to this genre and I have no roots here, so I'm relying on you guys to help me figure out what's going on, where I fit in, and whether or not I even belong here.
Hi then! Okay, you missed the olden age of adventure games, but well, that's not too much of a problem. You're here *now*.
To answer your questions:
How important is it to include seperate "look," "talk," and "hands" commands?
You can always decide to make a simpler interface. AGS allows you to make any set of commands you'd like. Adventure games started with a very long list of commands and then, by and large, simplified until there was only a "look" and "use" left. It's your decision, but purists will agree that the more commands you have, the more complex a game can become.
And many games "hid" puzzles by having an object respond to a command that wasn't obvious, and did well so.
Do I really need to worry about the 286s in the audience?
Not really ;) Some of us know what a 286 is, and I even owned a 086, but today you can count on most of us having superior hardware. Some of us can even play the first Tomb Raider ;D
No, honestly, I daresay a game in 800x600, be it 10 or even 20 MB in size, a good part of us can download and play it. But large filesize means that people will think twice before downloading, and a high resolution has some technical disadvantages (slower) and are not too often used.
How comfortable are you with me tainting the Adventure Game format with other genres?
Many adventure games have elements from other games, but in truth it was the adventure game genre that tainted others. Take FPS, so many of them have adventure elements. I daresay as long as your ideas are good, people will cheerish them. AGS has been used for non-adventure games already, and many were quite good.
I for one would d'load an AGS MahJong only to see it in action.
Let's agree that Adventure Games are NOT dead. Which would you prefer: nostalgia, or continued advancement of the genre?
Again, that's all up to you. Your only limits are those that AGS technical side dictates, and if you can improve on standards, well, do it!
Most newcomers start with low res and simple graphics because they're easier to animate, and in my opinion the retro look has more friends, but you also see quite modern looks here. Why not? "Adventure" is a genre, not a set of rules about the looks. If you can produce good artwork, all the better!
Hope that gave you a little info. Enjoy you stay!
Make whatever game you want to really, regardless of who you think will enjoy/be offended by it. This same advice does not apply if you intend to sell your creation, however. When producing something for the masses you will need to cater to a lot of general wants. As far as the pseudo-redundant options go, they were originally created to give the player greater freedom to manipulate the environment without using a parser. Over time, some of the verbs became redundant (push/pull when move would have done both (and interact, for that matter)). It depends on how much you want to break down your interface, because a one click for everything approach generally bothers some people who expect to be able to try a few different things. A verb coin of some sort is typically a good compromise for a designer who doesn't want a cluttered verb list but still wants to provide the player with a good selection of commands, and you'll find several examples of verb coins on this site if you look (including the one I made for a Leisure Suit Larry demo with inventory access, save/loading and all the necessary verbs).
How important is it to include seperate "look," "talk," and "hands" commands?
You know, as someone that hasn't been taught so much how adventure games work you're in a pretty good position to assess this actually. Adventure gamers are extremely nostalgic about these games, they are childhood favourites for most, and are fond of even the pointless aspects. I think that you're right about most games click options. You do always use doors and use machines and talk to NPCs, so there's very little point in multi verb interfaces in MOST adventure game designs. I don't believe that a single interaction interface reduces a game to an item hunt for the same reason. If different cursor modes don't add any choice then removing them doesn't remove one. There are uses for specified verbs, but don't feel pressured into using them. If adventure games had never transitioned from being text based then they would be much less common. Play Broken Sword 1 and 2, and (available free) Beneath a Steel Sky for examples of good games on a minimalistic interface.
"The MAJOR exception to this, of course, is the ACTUAL sierra games, especially (in my mind) Sam & Max, where I was eagerly scouring the room with all 3 click types, because I quickly realized there was comedic gold stashed away under every single rock and shrub." Sam and Max is a Lucasarts game :P If you like these kind of jokes attached to every click then Lucasarts is probably more your company. Or Space Quest would be your sierra game series. This kind of thing works fine for comedic games but if you're doing anything serious then most verb+item pairs can only give a "I don't want to do that" type response.
Do I really need to worry about the 286s in the audience?
Not particularly... if you don't think it's important. A 32 bit high res game is not likely to run at full speed on a 300Mhz computer, but the large majority of people that download your game will have well over 1Ghz, so it's not an issue for most. I get the impression people think high resolution graphics in AGS are a lot slower than they really are. Look at casual games in other genres, they're aimed at low-mid range computers but 800x600 in 32 bit colour is commonplace. AGS is not a slow engine, as long as you are reasonable with the effects.
How comfortable are you with me tainting the Adventure Game format with other genres?
They're interesting to see, and nobody is going to be offended... it's usually a bad idea to try making an entire non adventure game in an explicitly adventure game targetted engine though. You're making more work for yourself. I might download the game if it looked good. Very few people play only adventure games.
Let's agree that Adventure Games are NOT dead. Which would you prefer: nostalgia, or continued advancement of the genre?
People should make what they enjoy making, if it's a hobby, but personally I'd rather see advancement, informed by the older adventure games, but not bound by them. Things are much easier on us than they were on developers in the 90s, and if they were still releasing games the genre certainly wouldn't have remained static. It's all too easy to copy your favourite game/band/artist, it's how many people start in any creative medium. It was pretty much what the early AGS community was about. Things are changing though, more people are thinking as independant authors, it's a good thing from my perspective. There's still a lot to explore in interactive story based games.
Those are some thought provoking questions, and I agree with a number of Scotch's remarks.
I'd like to add regarding interactions that I prefer less 'wordy' interactions. My pet hate is GUIs with 'Open' and 'Close' separately. You can't open something that's open and you can't close something that's closed, so it's entirely unnecessary!
There is a real world between 'look' and 'use' but I find it frustrating when games distinguish between 'give' and 'use' for instance. I don't have to think in reality to decide whether I want to give someone a hammer or hit them with it, so I don't want to have to do that in an adventure. I would accept it if these distinctions were intrinsicaly linked to puzzles but they are only rarely.
I'd also advocate advancement rather than nostalgia. No more pirate games!
Wow, thanks for the quick feedback. :D
Ghost: How slow are we talking about here? Adventure games (at least when, IMHO, done right,) are essentially turn-based, so would slowdown even impact the game's performance? Before I read that FAQ, I was operating from the "everyone owns a pentium" mindset Scotch seems to share. Now I'm not so sure.
Scotch: I find your claim that hidden details would only work for comedic games something of an intriguing challenge. I for one could easily immagine some kinda emo game where every object laying around the guy's home has three distinct types of pathos attached to it. Or for that matter, a Lifetime Network type game where everything you manipulate brings back fond memories.
ProgZmax: I really do want to sell my creations. That said, I'm confident that virtually any game, regardless of genre, will sell as a casual game, as long as the graphics are decent, the gameplay involves a solid collection of risk/reward schedules, and it's not too short, trite, or amaturish. If I do that, though, it'll be in Flash or some other all-encompassing, high-end game engine. I know AGS isn't acommercial game tool, and I'm here anyway because the community just seems so damn cool.
Ali: "Arrrrrrrrrrrr you sure about that?" ;)
Overall: I do realize that hidden puzzles are nifty, it just kinda bugs me having that Eat command on the menu when I know only 2 objects in the game will ever use it. If one of those eatable objects is something non-obvious... say, a screwdriver, then I am basically dooming my players to getting so bored and frustrated and lost that they start randomly trying to eat things, or (if they're smart,) give up and Google a walkthrough only to find out that some jerk programmer expected you to go around randomly eating things. On the other hand, if all the eatables are foods, then why not just replace "eat" with "use?" Further condensing "use" and "look" into a "look-then-use" or a "look-or-use" makes sense to me, but only because I've seen SO MANY games that use default responses for so many objects. IMHO, if I add a command to the list, I'd damned well better have 400 interesting uses of that command in my game. Otherwise having it is a waste of the player's time. Again, Sam & Max was the notable exception that made it all worthwhile.
Glad to hear that most of you... errr, three of you... have a decent computer. My main thing is, modern games START at 640x480, 32-bit and go up to 1024 and beyond. Some experts even suggest 800x600, just to be safe! Modern games avoid slowdown by utilizing the computer's 3D card in the game engine, even when drawing 2D sprites to the screen. I realize that AGS probabaly doesn't do this, and it would be arrogant of me to assume the folks browsing this forum even have a GPU.
Frankly, if I'd only caught the Adventure Game bug, I'd probabaly do it in Flash. But it's the AGS bug that I've caught. Don't ask me why. It just intrigues me for some reason.
I daresay I can probably produce better artwork than I can writing. It's that "retro has more friends" thing that bugs me. I mean, I've seen graphics that I could have sworn were CGA except for the obvious circular gradient over the top of it. WTF is that!? My mind boggles. That's what makes me wonder if I'm not barking up the wrong tree here. Retro for retro's sake.
You seem pretty supportive, though, so I'll stick around and do my best. :D
Slowdowns *can* appear, but you'll have to search quite some games to find any.
If you wish to see an example, d'load "Two of a Kind". There is one screen where a swarm of bees hovers, each bee being a character, and they are controlled by a plugin. On a P200 you can see the movement becoming jerky.
And that's it- it means that an animation *can* look a bit jerky. But I wouldn't fear that this'll happen too soon. The new AGS 3.0 has some tricks up its sleeve (D3D support), so I daresay 640x480 at 32 is no problem at all, and 800x600 neither. I was more referring to the additional work AA sprites and high-res graphics require.
Then again, I *am* an old man, and have witnessed some of the games that are called "old classics" being released. I'm surely a bit biased when I say that Adventure games just look so nice in low res.
I too think that few people here have less than 1G. I own a computer at the lowest end of the scale, an 1.5 Athlon, 512 MB RAM, with an onBoard NVidia 6100. I was able to play 640x480 games on a P200, though, so don't think too much about speed issues.
Quote from: WarpZone on Sun 18/11/2007 12:19:31
Let's agree that Adventure Games are NOT dead. Which would you prefer: nostalgia, or continued advancement of the genre? Another way of phrasing this question might be "Do shiny pre-rendered Adventure Games miss the point completely?" Recent big-budget attempts to revive the genre have historically failed in a commercial sense, but my hope is that a well-crafted adventure game could still stand on its own in the Casual Games market, or perhaps even as donation-ware. But my intention is to use modern graphics, modern resolutions, and perhaps even a modern gamer's mindset when creating them. How does this statement make you feel? Be honest.
Well, great. If you do it well. Innovation alone won't get you anywhere: you have to actually make a good game, too. It's easy to misinterpret this realization as simple technophobia or desire for nostalgia, but I think some of these recent failures have failed not because they were trespassing on the territory of traditionalists, but because they just sucked. For instance, Fahrenheit was, in my opinion, a very dull and forgettable game, not because it tried to revolutionize the genre, but because it failed. It's not enough to
want to do something new: you have to do it and do it well. And that's really as difficult now as it has ever been. For instance, the technology involved in animated motion pictures keeps evolving, but I've really yet to see something that beats Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs from an aesthetic point of view.
Quote from: WarpZone on Sun 18/11/2007 12:19:31
Sierra-style trumped the verb-clouds, the verb-clouds trumped the type-ins, type-ins trumped the text-onlys. Are you interested in seeing something new trump Sierra-style, or would such a game be a blasphemous offense to everything that Adventure Games once stood for?
I'm not sure what you mean by Sierra-style (in my mind Sierra is still most closely linked with text parser), but in my experience Beneath a Steel Sky-type interfaces ("look" and "do stuff") beats just about everything. If you can trump that, go ahead.
Ghost: I am guessing that, unless there's some severe bottleneck in the scripting engine, DirectX support will result in a vast speed-up for games that dare to use large numbers of characters at once... did... did you call it Direct3D? :o
EldKatt: That's sage advice for any game developer. Also, I think I was saying Sierra-style in that post, when I actually meant to say LucusArts-Style. Sorry for any confusion.
How important is it to include separate "look," "talk," and "hands" commands?
I'd say this depends more on the game itsself. If you don't need them, you're better off not using them.
In AGS, making a two-mouse button-click system is a tiny bit more difficult than using default Sierra-style, but there's way too much games which include full 9-command LucasArts verb list, and rarely any of those are needed.
This is what sucks, in my opinion. Even some original LA games didn't really need this long list, and all it donated was more difficulty. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, for example. There was only tiny bit of things you had to either "give", "pull", or "close". And all of them could have been worked around with simple "use" aswell.
I somewhat dislike meaningless complexity in GUIs. If it has purpose, why not. But to simply be there...
Do I really need to worry about the 286s in the audience?
In 2007? Rarely. Being able to play game on 133Mhz Pentium with integrated 2MB videocard is extreme user friendliness, yes. But that shouldn't be reason to make game not as good as you want or could, or tune down any fireworks. Majority of potential players and their systems should be your priority here. Again, clear thinking is best option here. There's no point in game that most people cannot play, but shitty game that works on everything won't be played either.
How comfortable are you with me tainting the Adventure Game format with other genres?
Doesn't that depend on genre? Many adventure games have an arcade sequence, and puzzles, that can make whole another game, like some sort of jigsaw puzzle or so. As long as there's way to skip the arcade sequence and difficulty in anything else isn't neckbreaking, you can include whatever you like, without further worry.
I think that most people liked casino minigames in Leisure Suit Larry. Even if you sucked at it, you could save and reload and cheat your way through. But not so many liked the bike fighting in Full Throttle.
Whatever you decide to include, please, for the love of god, don't include a stupid maze. So many 90's adventure titles have atleast one idiotic, pace killing, illogical maze in them. Kyrandia? Shadow of the Comet? Igor: Objective Uikokahonia? Eck.
Let's agree that Adventure Games are NOT dead. Which would you prefer: nostalgia, or continued advancement of the genre?
Look at Yahtzee's games - Trilby series, Ben Jordan series, anything popular. Your answer is there. These games are not about nostalgia, they're simply superfunctional. The graphics is just as much as it's needed to create atmosphere and make a visual point. Neither mspainted backgrounds or overdetailed pre-rendered 3D will do any good, if it doesn't function right. You have to find a balance of some sort. What you can do, do it best, and don't go for things that wouldn't turn out so well.
However you describe this "continued advancement of the genre", only thing to avoid is a powerpoint slideshow, and that's what all these fancy new 3D games are. Click to see next render, without any real gaming or immersion in it. Everybody can hire a good artist, but not everyone could make an interesting game.
EDIT: Also, I totally second what ProgZmax said about commercial games. If you're trying to sell something, you have to make it 300% as good, because - and I don't know even why - first reaction on a commercial game is dislike.
AGS has used DirectX as long as it has been on Windows. The latest version supports Direct3D as well. Any computer that has a DirectX supporting 3D accelerator is going to be able to play 800x600x32 in either mode, but D3D mode will let you use lots of alpha blended or scaled graphics with no slowdown. People avoid high res because they find low res easier to work on, or prefer pixel art, it's much less to do with speed.
Quote from: WarpZone on Sun 18/11/2007 13:51:21
... did... did you call it Direct3D? :o
I had the same expression as that smiley when I first heard about it ;D
You should visit the Technical forum, where you can read a lot about that development. If 2.72 isn't fast enough for you, 3.0 most possibly will be.
Huh. I thought Direct3D was "what they called it in the late 90's" and DirectX was "what they call it now." I didn't know all that. Thanks for the info.
Edit: Wait, I remember now. DirectX was the older one. It meant 2D games in Windows.
Yeah, using Direct3D (or even OpenGL, since all major competing GPUs these days are highly optimized for both graphics languages) in your core engine allows you to draw 2D sprites to the screen as 3D polygons, which means they bennefit from the GPU's hardware acceleration.
Depending on how the chips fall, you might even be able to afford to blow Characters on things like particle effects, after this next update! :)
As a matter of fact, DirectX is the name for a suite of different libraries, Direct3D being one of them.
Don't get too exited about graphical eye candy, though; AGS is, at its heart, an engine dedicated to make adventure games, and 2D, nor true 3D. Particle effects, well, we have a plug for that, but to be honest, I've yet to see it in action.
What exactly do you have in mind? I agree that adventure game and casual game get along quite well, but since you seem to have ideas on how to mix them, could you get into a little more detail?
Quote from: Ghost on Sun 18/11/2007 12:27:42
How important is it to include seperate "look," "talk," and "hands" commands?
You can always decide to make a simpler interface. AGS allows you to make any set of commands you'd like. Adventure games started with a very long list of commands and then, by and large, simplified until there was only a "look" and "use" left. It's your decision, but purists will agree that the more commands you have, the more complex a game can become.
And many games "hid" puzzles by having an object respond to a command that wasn't obvious, and did well so.
The "wittier" the game, the better is to have different commands, IMHO. You can add lots of humor when the player starts trying every verb-object-hotspot combination. As the atmosphere of the game gets darker or more serious that interface loses a bit of its appeal but it is indeed invaluable to design fresh puzzles.
Well, Ghost, right now I'm still at the "imitation" phase, but I've had some ambitious thoughts on the matter. (One of them being, "Hmmm, what can I do with 300 characters?") I have a few novel ideas for loose plots for adventure games. Presumably I'll pick one of those and start developing it. I need to dig deeper into the engine before I'll have any solid ideas for game design, because I don't know the limitations of the engine yet.
In Flash, I'd design my own interface, use a one-click system and add pop-up menus (punch the guy, talk to the guy) for special case choices not covered by a simple one-click system. OR, I might make a find-the-button game deliberately lacking the context to predict what will happen when you find it. (A'la Myst. I wouldn't recommend inkjecting this approach into a more traditional game, since it quickly becomes a source of headaches, but if it's clear from the start that the entire world is a mystery and all the choices lead to surprises, then it lends the whole game its own sense of enigma.)
Basically, I figure I've got one or two screens at the start of an AGS game in which to train the player's expectations. I figure I can't stick something BRAND NEW in after that point, for example, a real-time combat scene 2/3 of the way through the game, because if I do, the player won't be expecting th unexpected by that point. So, that's one pitfall to avoid.
It seems to me that adventure games are primarily about exploration, decision-making, and storytelling. I don't consider egnigmatic ways of interacting with the environment to be a meaningful source of gameplay. I think the controls should always be as simple as possible, because that gives the player the ability to meaningfully affect the game's outcome. I'm not sure that "challenge" has any meaningful definition in this genre of game, unless you added some reflex-based stuff. But again, if a mini-game like that exists, better to build a whole special game around it than to tack it onto a standard adventure game.
My previous comments about risk/reward cycles was a comment about games in general, and now that I think about it, it doesn't apply here. Rather, the risk (if any) is making the wrong choice, or failing to make the right choice in time. (And it always bugged me when 7 Days a Skeptic would do a long dialogue scene, then give you 2 seconds in which to act before killing you, with no opprotunity to save your game beforehand. IMHO, that's bad form.) That said, I absolutely LOVED how in Six Days a Sacrifice, if you died you'd just wake up in bed from the point right before you made that ill-fated decision. I consider that a brilliant game-over scenario, especially for a horror game.
I plan to spend today tinkering with AGS and trying to discover some of its limits. I'll let you know more about my plans, intentions, and goals once I better understand the limits and abilities of this system.
If you were asking about the plots, worlds, and protagonists going through my head, well, I'm not prepared to reveal any of them yet. A little bird told me it's better to surprise everyone with a release than to build anticipation and then cancel a project. ;D
Quote from: WarpZone on Sun 18/11/2007 12:19:31
How important is it to include seperate "look," "talk," and "hands" commands?
Giving the players more options tends to make the game more fun for them, and encourages them to think. Note how LucasArts games have between
nine and fifteen options, not three. If a puzzle can be lazily solved by simply clicking on every hotspot, that's no fun.
Of course, if you have multiple interactions in your game, you are pretty much obliged to give interesting
responses for most of them.
Do I really need to worry about the 286s in the audience?It's not as bad as it sounds. An AGS game (even a 100-Mb one) will run on a 350 MHz machine, and will only show marginal slowdown in 800x600. I know this because I used to
write such games on such a machine.
How comfortable are you with me tainting the Adventure Game format with other genres?If you're making an adventure game, a minigame or two in it are nice but it shouldn't be overdone (and many people think any kind of "action" sequence should be skippable).
If you're simply making a different-genre game in AGS, people will probably play it for the novelty, but it goes without saying that there are plenty of Shmups already and an AGS shmup probably won't be among the most interesting of those. The key word here is "probably". If you are a good designer, you can write a good shmup, regardless of the platform.
Let's agree that Adventure Games are NOT dead. Which would you prefer: nostalgia, or continued advancement of the genre? Heh. Depends on what you mean by "advancement of the genre". People are very much divided over whether certain changes are "advancements" or "drawbacks".
Quote
LucusArts-style trumped the verb-clouds, the verb-clouds trumped the type-ins, type-ins trumped the text-onlys.
That's actually false. Check out Legend's text adventure games, for one. The only reason why type-ins became unpopular is because Sierra (the only company that was big on type-ins) had a horrendously bad parser.
People still make, play, and enjoy text-only games. I'm not sure what you mean by "verb cloud", anyway.
Quote from: WarpZone on Sun 18/11/2007 17:23:33
A little bird told me it's better to surprise everyone with a release than to build anticipation and then cancel a project. ;D
Grin back. For someone who calls himself a humble newcomer you have some very precise plans, and your background in design doesn't sound too shabby too. I wish you luck!
And to team up with Radiant, try googling for an IF game by the name of
"Curses" (made by Graham Nelson). You will need WinFrotz to play it. I'm sure you will appreciate this game's unique puzzles and its quality parser.
Ghost: Well, I'm a newcomer to AGS. :) I haven't used it before, I haven't played many adventure games, and I didn't even have the common decency to lurk here for a good while before I started posting. I may immagine I know a thing or two about video games, but that doesn't mean I'm not a hapless noob when it comes to AGS.
Plus, I'm American, so I figured I'd better preface my first post with a little humility, just to throw you all off the scent.
Radiant: Yup, I agree with you that if I have 15-20 options, I am obligated to write an interesting response for every verb to every object. Otherwise they become pointless red-herrings 90% of the time. Actually, even if I do create interesting responses, "throw shoe at baby" would still be a red herring. It'd just be an INTERESTING red herring that was rewarding to attempt.
There is a difference between actual complexity, implied complexity, and precieved complexity. Adding verbs implies greater complexity, but only verb-object combinations that yeild interesting results will be counted by the player as precieved complexity. Actual complexity is content, hidden or exposed, that the developer has written and the player can access.
Oh, and by the phrase "verb-cloud," I just meant a pop-up box of 15-30 verbs that the game explicitly tells you can be used to interact with the game world. So, post-parser, pre-look/use/talk paradigm.
And you have a good point. Trilby's Notes was the most well-recieved game in the Number Days a Noun series, so it's clear that players still enjoy the parser approach. I guess it was irresponsible of me to describe it as the simpler interfaces "trumping" the more complex ones. Then again, the first few people who responded didn't seem to have a problem with my word choice, so I'd immagine there are two camps.
I'll tell you what, I promise you that if I ever do make a game with 3 verbs, I'll use all 3, all over the place. If I make a verb-cloud game, I'll make it clear which verbs are useful and which ones are filler. If I make a text parser game, I'll write a meaningful response for every possible combination of actions I can think of. ("You ponder using the needle-nose pliers on the boarded-up door, but the nails are sunk much too deeply into the sturdy wood. You'll have to find something stronger.")
I think we can both agree that the more content the better, that content should be revealed bit by bit through exploration, and that each new revelation should logically (if subtly) lead the player towards the next. The only difference is what counts as "exploration," or which type of exploration is more meaningful: exploring a physical world or trying out different ideas.
My main issue with parsers is that they force the player to manipulate a black box of possible commands. Actions that seem reasonable to ME might not be in there. ("Get bottle." "You can't. It's behind the counter." "Jump over counter." "I don't understand the word 'jump.'" "Crawl over counter" "I don't understand the word 'crawl'" "Climb over counter." "You have to get closer before you can climb the fire escape." "So let me get this straight. I'm supposedly playing as Trilby, master catburgular, and you're telling me I can't even crawl over a bar top to steal a bottle of booze, in a completely empty room devoid of whitnesses, at a hotel where all the staff have already disappeared into an alternate dimmension and been cut into finger sandwiches?" "I don't understand the word 'logic.'")
Of course, if I ever do choose to make a parser game, I'll try to anticipate every crackpot plan the player might come up with, but my gut tells me that's just not possible. So rather than create a game that supposedly offers limitless creativity but in fact just requires the player to guess not only a solution, but the same solution the game designer though of, I'd rather create a game that says "These are your tools. This is the world. This is your goal. Good luck."
Hm, might as well put it directly here.
Curses (http://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/inform/curses.z5)
WinFrotz (http://www.download.com/WinFrotz/3000-7504_4-10503213.html)
Enjoy.
Okay, see, just for the record, this is what I don't like about text parser games. I had to try 11 commands before it actually recognized one of them, and the thing I was finally
allowed to do was the exact opposite of what I WANTED to do:
Quote
Before the Building
The building rises before you, a hulking shadow, blocking out the stars above and disfiguring the moon. Windows upon windows pit its smooth obsidian surface, glinting like tiny gasoline-colored eyes. A garrulous display of floodlights spray up from the ground floor like failed fireworks, casting writhing shadows from the dense bushes that ring the building except where the sidewalk splits them asunder. The slate sidewalk continues from the building, between the hedges to end at your feet, eroded smooth.
>exits
[ You've discovered a verb that the game does not recognize. If you're frustrated, look for common verbs in the general IF help menu by tying 'help'. ]
>leave building
You are already outside the building!
>walk away
You do not see that here.
>exit
But you aren't in anything at the moment.
>flee
[ You've discovered a verb that the game does not recognize. If you're frustrated, look for common verbs in the general IF help menu by tying 'help'. ]
>do not enter building
[ You've discovered a verb that the game does not recognize. If you're frustrated, look for common verbs in the general IF help menu by tying 'help'. ]
>enter building
You see no entrance here.
>shoot self
[ You've discovered a verb that the game does not recognize. If you're frustrated, look for common verbs in the general IF help menu by tying 'help'. ]
>inventory
You are carrying nothing.
>look around
I only understood you as far as wanting to look.
>look
Before the Building
The building rises before you, a hulking shadow, blocking out the stars above and disfiguring the moon. Windows upon windows pit its smooth obsidian surface, glinting like tiny gasoline-colored eyes. A garrulous display of floodlights spray up from the ground floor like failed fireworks, casting writhing shadows from the dense bushes that ring the building except where the sidewalk splits them asunder. The slate sidewalk continues from the building, between the hedges to end at your feet, eroded smooth.
>follow sidewalk
South Entrance
Here, the sidewalk ends at double-glass doors, surrounded by hedges. The floodlights crouched near the building wall spew harsh fluorescent light upwards, making the doors nearly translucent. The wind sighs, rustling the hedges, and their shadows flicker in menacing serpent-shaped dances.
The yellowed glass doors are closed.
A sleek, black brick is mounted flush to the wall, blinking red. A narrow indentation bisects it left to right.
You can also see a spiky soft ball here.
>
All I wanted to do was, you know, get away from the building, since every single word of text in the introduction made it clear that entering the building would be pretty much a Bad Thing. Failing that, I tried to enter the building, and was AGAIN thwarted. It doesn't even use a nice simple N,S,W,E description so I can't properly visualize the area. I guess I'm just the wrong type of player for parser games.
Oh. But I've just realized that I was playing Building, the demo game that comes with not WinFrotz, and not Curses. I'll be sure and give Curses a go before I dismiss the genre. I just felt the log of my first steps in Building made a better demonstration of my issue with the genre than anything I could have come up with.
I started curses, but I couldn't figure out what was going on. They refused to give you a list of obvious exits to each room, so finding the room directly below the attic room where I lost the key to the attic (which, correct me if I'm wrong, wouldn't that not be such a big deal if I was already IN the attic with an open attic door to begin with?) was already infinitely more difficult than it would be in real life.
When I meandered east a few times, and started to realize how large the house was, I quickly lost interest. I'm sure it's a great text parser game, but it doesn't even try to meet me half way in terms of presenting the information I need in order to make choices in the game. If anything, it only made me better appreciate the games that have pictures of each room with big, obvious doors connecting them. :P
Sorry, Ghost.
I meant to showcase Curses! because it is considered a genre milestone, despite its shortcomings. Some puzzles are pretty unforgiving, and you can blow up the game in certain places without noticing so.
Your reaction demonstrates the difference between an "oldfashioned" and a "modern" player. We (that is, people like me, who are well above 30) have grown up with this sort of game. If we read "banister rails leading east", we know that we can go east, and leave it at that. Leaving the attic means losing the game, so the dropped key is considered a challenge that will be faced later (in this case you will, later in the game, use a toy mouse with a magnet attached to it to get the key back).
We learned the rules a long time ago and still remember them.
A modern player, on the other hand, has never experienced this strange feeling that a computer seems to "understand" natural language. That a game reacts. That someone actually wrote code that punishes you for using swearwords. It's something that's oldfashioned. But as Radiant said, these games are still played, and enjoyed. I just wanted to show you the graphic-less side of the coin. Somehow I'm a bit disappointed you dismissed it so quickly, but no offence taken.
None intended, man. :)
But, I mean, not telling the player up front that leaving the attic means you lose? Not ending the game after the player loses? Building dozens of rooms well outside the playable area of the game? Forget video game theory; this game doesn't even follow the basic precepts of most board games, sports, or indeed fiction.
Maybe I'll read a walkthrough some time in order to understand what's so great about it without the tedium of actually playing it. Seriously. It's so unapproachable, I can't immagine anyone ever deliberately playing it unless it was released under circumstances in which it was the only game availible to play, ever, and no one had ever played a computer game before or had any expectations whatsoever.
I actually have played one or two interactive fiction games before, and I've got three words for you. Obvious Exits Are:
I'll certianly do some digging on the staple text-only games when I find the time. CCC and all that. And yes, I can appreciate that discovering the rules of this game can be a game in itself. I've certianly played some Flash games before that wove a compelling, if visual thread of egnigmatic interactivity and discovery, just by making you wonder what you should click on, then surprising you with the results when you do finally click. I suppose there's no reason why you can't do that same mysterious thing with text. But enjoyment of such a game requires a certian mindset, going into it, and I certianly wasn't expecting what I got.
It's basically a video game that plays like performance art. That's not neccessarily an insult, or a compliment, but it's my sincere first impression.
You weren't just showing me the text side of the coin, you see. Any well-written text-only game could do that. Any MUD, MUSH, or MOO, for that matter. You were actually inadvertantly also showing me the minimalist-usability approach. The not-even-pretending-to-hold-the-player's-hand approach. And while I can certianly appreciate the mystique of that approach (Alternate Reality Games are the wave of the future, y'know,) I think it's important to at least let the player know up front what he's getting into. Otherwise, you end up with confusion like mine.
And I mean, now that I realize the game has a secret agenda of its own, it definitely warrants further consideration. The real takeaway from Curses! is the philosophical opposite of a simplistic GUI. It's not just a text game, but a deliberately obtuse text game. The kind of game that causes 30 or 40 players to discuss the game at lunch or over late-night phone calls. Because honestly, there's no other way to get through it.
I'm familiar with this concept, it's the driving force behind the newly-emerging field of ARGs. I just never expected to be handed a single-player video game that used it. And I certianly wouldn't develop such a game at this day in age, because as soon as The Internet has all the pieces to the puzzle, the complete solution will be availible via Google overnight. The only reason ARGs manage to build and sustain that kind of communication is because the pieces of the puzzle are released one by one, very gradually, over a period of months. And as soon as the game is over, it's over, and no newcomers to the game can really get anything new out of it, because the public discourse, speculation, and experimentation has all already been accomplished.
It's an interesting methodology, though, and certianly the antidote to all my previous complaints about Adventure Games not being transparent enough. I'll definitely try to learn what I can from Curses!, when I have the time.
Thank you. :)
Quote from: WarpZone on Sun 18/11/2007 20:10:28
None intended, man. :)
But, I mean, not telling the player up front that leaving the attic means you lose? Not ending the game after the player loses? Building dozens of rooms well outside the playable area of the game? Forget video game theory; this game doesn't even follow the basic precepts of most board games, sports, or indeed fiction.
The preface tells you that you want to find a key in the attics, and you start in the attics. All locations you visit are part of the attics. If you leave the attic through the trapdoor, you lose, and the game says so.
I won't go defending a game here- games are, after all, a matter of style, but I wanted to clear this up. ;)
One thing I find important, however, is your mentioning that "non-accessibilty" aspect. Adventure games, as has been mentioned here before, are about exploration, discovery. It has also been said that all those commands are actually part of a game to support the exploration. You seem to wish for a clear, simple interface, with the largest effectiveness and accessibility possible.
The old joke about the "press a to win the game" effect suddenly pops up. An interface should be slick and simple, just don't forget to take care that a GUI never solves your game for you.
Ehhh? I thought it said "to the west the banister goes down a flight of stairs, following it east goes blah de blah de blah" I went west. I figured that meant I was on the second floor of the house now. It had a greenhouse and a sitting room and everything. Or so I thought. Maybe I was reading it wrong.
For that matter, just the fact that the word "attic" was plural threw me. Was this supposed to be some kinda mansion or something? Or was every move command the equivilent of a 5-foot step?
Now I'm more ocnfused than ever. The more I learn, the less I know. Heh.
The game takes place in The Meldrew Halls, and it is indeed a large manor, and by and by you can puzzle together that you're the last Meldrew, who has all the junk and none of the splendor. ;)
During the game you eventually explore the attics and will find them about 20 locations in size and a century or so deep. I was quite comfortable with that but I agree that it can surprise anyone not familiar with the, well, mechanics of IF.
I was a bit unfair, because Curses really is a hard game. There is a walkthrough, though. If you're willing to give it a second chance, d'load it and play the game with the walkthough by your side. I promise you will not regret it.
Quote from: WarpZone on Sun 18/11/2007 18:49:43
Okay, see, just for the record, this is what I don't like about text parser games.
No, this is the fallacy that people always bring up when talking about text parser games. Any decent parser, which includes just about everything by Infocom and Legend, won't have you verb hunting. The problem is that the parsers people are most familiar with, i.e. Sierra, are abysmal in quality.
But text games tend not to take you "by the hand" as much as most contemporary games. Sandboxing hath its charms.
So is the AGS parser "one of the good ones?" It sounds like what really makes or breaks a text parser game isn't the parser itself, but the words you populate it with and the relationships between those words. Synonyms, combinations of verbs and objects, and so forth.
For reference, I made it through Trilby's Notes, and I considered it a "pretty good" game as far as text-parser games go. But I was still mildly annoyed in a few spots where solutions I thought were obvious simply hadn't been considered by the guy who wrote the game. Do you cosnider that a parser issue? I think of it as more of a content oversight. I.E., just to make sure I understand what you're saying, do you think of keywords as content or part of the parser?
I realize that it's possible to make good text-parser games. Don't worry about that. In fact, I'm fairly certian (based on anecdotal evidence) that a text-parser adventure game would be more popular than the same game content implemented as a point-&-click. I'm just not sure at this point if I'd want to do it that way or not. Frankly, I don't trust myself to adequately predict what the players would attempt.
I do appreciate your opinions, though, and I hope you'll keep sharing them. I don't learn anything when everyone agrees with me. :)
Quote from: WarpZone on Sun 18/11/2007 21:52:44
So is the AGS parser "one of the good ones?"
Unfortunately, not really, although you can help by filling it's synonym table.
What makes a good parser is being able to "put all books except the green in the big suitcase then lock it". No, I'm not kidding.
Fascinating.
You know, I'd always heard that Starship Titanic had "the most advanced parser evar" or something, since it was produced years after the genre was largely played-out in a commercial sense. It was supposed to allow all kinds of unheard-of interactivity, even capable of going off on tangents and getting into conversations with the player. But when I finally got the game and installed it, it just kept trying to nudge me along its own pre-defined path on rails. Then it turned out the Suck-U-Bus graphics wouldn't display. Patches didn't help, so I assumed it was just a graphics driver incompatability or a dammaged disk. It wasn't living up to the hype, and for all I know there could have been important buttons to click hidden in that black void, so I eventually uninstalled it.
Tell me, what are some of the best text games with the best parsers? They can be graphical or text-only. Either way. Parsers seem very important to you, so I might as well learn about them by studying some of your favorites.
And more directly relevant to the matter at hand, what are some of your favorite AGS games, and why? I assume you're here because you like Adventure Games, even if they don't have a text parser, or have a mediocre one.
Inform can be considered the leading standard in the text parser genre, on the base that it
a) comes with a huge library of pre-made commands
b) can easily be custom-made to include even more commands
c) can digest relatively natural and complex sentences
and
d) is capable of parsing even vague input by asking sensible questions.
Inform can be found here.
http://www.inform-fiction.org/inform6.html (http://www.inform-fiction.org/inform6.html)
And this magazine might also be of interest...
http://www.xyzzynews.com/ (http://www.xyzzynews.com/)
The Starship parser could have been great but was, in my oppinion, a let-down. The same goes for the game itself.
Parsers are just tools, but I surely appreciate the interest. The hidden beauty of a parser is that the seem so old-fashioned, but are in fact highly sophisticated. I mean, it's a software that must understand grammar and reply to it. Typing "eat fish" is easy but feels a bit like writing a stenograph; "look under the table, take everything from under the table but the large imp with a chainsaw", however, feels natural and can be parsed by Inform.
Also, disambiguities like "fire the waiter" can be automatically sorted out ;)
Since you seem to be very open-minded (always highly appreciated) I have another little gem: Nord and Bert Can't Make Head Or Tails Of It is a superb IF that relies on puns. Only on puns. The whole gameplay is to re-style the scenery by finding plays on word, so that a gritty pearl can become a pretty girl or you can gobble up your words.
I don't know if it can be (legally) found on the 'nets, but it might be at some abandonware site.
Oh don't get me wrong, I do enjoy graphical adventure games a lot. I just also like text parser games. Plus I'm took a class in college studying their back-ends.
The most advanced parser ever is surprisingly old. Try anything by Infocom, really. Most of them are downloadable for free, if you google them.
Wishbringer is good for beginners. Enchanter/Sorcerer/Spellbreaker is an excellent trilogy (note that the third part is really hard). Then, there are a lot of indie games in the genre, with a yearly contest (where you do get graded on literary qualities). Good games include The Meteor, The Sherbet and the Long Glass of Ice Tea (weird title, I know) and my personal fave would be Slouching Towards Bedlam (which is not really recommended to beginners).
The company Legend was founded by an infocommie, and borrowed their parser. Spellcasting 101 and (esp.) 202 are very nice, as is Eric the Unready. These are probably available on eBay or in bargain bins.
Finally, although they have somewhat less advanced parsers, three classics that are worth trying are Zork (aka Colossal Cave), The Hobbit, and Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (all of which should be available for free, and the Hobbit has graphics albeit low-res ones).
Fave AGS games? I suppose it would not be humble to point out my own (see signature)? :) I haven't played any AGS games with a text parser, I don't think it is used much. Good games that come to mind are Larry Vales (for the humor), Spooks (for the main character) and Cirque de Zale (for the overall gamingness).
IMHO, of course. You owe me a penny for my thoughts ;)
abandonia.com has some of the games Radiant mentioned, plus Lurking Horror, a game that can only be considered a must-play. Tricky, though, but great atmosphere all the same.
As an old player of adventure games, I'm pretty much tossing my hat in with you on the text parser issue, WarpZone. I've played just about every game mentioned so far and found them lacking in the interactivity department and just not very engaging unless looked at as a novel you have some minor control over (when seen from this view I've enjoyed a few of them, though not because they were games).
The thing you have to understand about IF, though, is that they were designed around guiding a player towards a solution rather than drawing a big sign and saying 'here it is'. The hand-holding nature of modern games has become more than a small problem in my opinion, relieving the player of all but the most simple decisions and showing or telling you exactly what you need to do in most cases to achieve the optimum result. What this does is make you lazy, and the lazier you get the less likely you are to even try to enjoy a challenging game, often to the point where you'll just play with a walkthrough handy. That isn't really enjoying a game, and I think there needs to be some place between not showing you anything and making it all obvious.
I happened to play a Cthulhu-based IF awhile back that was like an rpg, with classes and combat and such and an interesting story. I don't remember the name right now, but what it lacked in sheer input options it made up for with good dialog and amusing gameplay.
Quote from: WarpZone on Sun 18/11/2007 21:52:44
Frankly, I don't trust myself to adequately predict what the players would attempt.
I just want to point out that you can always go back and modify the game after you release it, according to player suggestions. Or you could have it extensively play-tested and write responses to all the commands the testers tried (Al Lowe used this method when creating Leisure Suit Larry 1).
How comfortable are you with me tainting the Adventure Game format with other genres?
If, and olny if, it makes sense with the thematic I'm sure it can be good.
Let's agree that Adventure Games are NOT dead. Which would you prefer: nostalgia, or continued advancement of the genre?
As many have said before, it's somewhat a fake dilema.
I'm not a nostalgic. I'm just a realist. IMHO I have difficulties to appreciate actual commercial adventure game, mainly for their lack of possible interaction, their propention for pixel-hunting and their huge linearity. And most of those happens to be side effects of putting so many ressources on graphics / animations / movies.
The Dan Movie-Like Modern-Adventure-Game Emulator
- Put a movie in your dvd player. Every 5 minutes stop it and roll a D6 :
1 - Take a walk back and forth to the washroom D6 times. Press Play.
2 - Read a random page of a joke magazine. Rewind 2 minutes. Read the joke again.
3 - Do a crossword puzzle or a Chessmaster 2000 tutorial. For any hesitation you had, hit the |<< button.
4 - Unplugued your DVD-player. Wear boxing gloves. Replug it then press play.
5 - Put a totally different DVD in. Continue the game with this one for the next 15 minutes.
6 - Lock yourself in a cupboard. Stay there and roll the dice until you got 6 again. Get out.
If you want your characters to actually talk, or if your expecting them to have a fully realistic animation to everything they do you're taking the risk to shorten a lot the possible game play. The typical exemple was Phantasmagoria. You just can't do nothing. The gameplay is to found what you can actually interact to trigered a movie.
Quote from: LUniqueDan on Mon 19/11/2007 02:23:11
The Dan Movie-Like Modern-Adventure-Game Emulator
- Put a movie in your dvd player. Every 5 minutes stop it and roll a D6 :
1 - Take a walk back and forth to the washroom D6 times. Press Play.
2 - Read a random page of a joke magazine. Rewind 2 minutes. Read the joke again.
3 - Do a crossword puzzle or a Chessmaster 2000 tutorial. For any hesitation you had, hit the |<< button.
4 - Unplugued your DVD-player. Wear boxing gloves. Replug it then press play.
5 - Put a totally different DVD in. Continue the game with this one for the next 15 minutes.
6 - Lock yourself in a cupboard. Stay there and roll the dice until you got 6 again. Get out.
Spoiler
I'm stuck. Rolled a 6 and I cant continue cuz there's no light in my cupboard pl z someone ehlp!
It's something like half an hour I'm laughing while reading the MAGE (what an acrostic/acronym by the way)!
How important is it to include seperate "look," "talk," and "hands" commands?It's not really important, what is important is to find an equilibrium between the simplicity of left click/right click and the challenge of text parser interfaces. A two mouse buttons interface's simplicity can be compensated with intelligent and more challenging inventory puzzles, witty dialogue trees and a varying range of puzzles. An interface need to be easy to use without being a "click the button to solve the puzzle" kind of game. Gobliins 2 come to my mind as another example of adventure game that only had a 1 button that was used to look, take, use, talk and yet was very challenging. The Kyrandia games too only had a 1 or 2 mouse button interfaces and were very good games.
Verbs and interface can also serve a bigger role in adventure game, an unique interface/set of verbs can greatly improve the game's experience and the range of verb available to the player can also tell a bit about your protagonist's personality. Loom's musical interface and Full Throttle's "Look, Talk, Interact/Punch, Kick" verb-coin interface are good examples of that.
Do I really need to worry about the 286s in the audience?Personally the only thing that might pull me off is the installer file's size. For a .torrent I won't mind, but begining at 250mb, I'll think twice before I download an installer only available in direct download.
How comfortable are you with me tainting the Adventure Game format with other genres?I am very confortable with it, but I represent only a fraction of a 0.0001% of the adventure community. From general experience, a significant chunk of the adventure community is allergic to any adventure games that doesn't fit their own personal definition of a traditionnal adventure game. For some not only arcade sequences are a problem but they would completly ditch the puzzle solving aspect of it and just keep the storytelling and exploration aspects.
Nothing prevent you from making experiment with the adventure game genre, but release one or two polished prototypes for free to test the market before you venture yourself in commercially releasing an adventure game that combine aspect of other genres.
Let's agree that Adventure Games are NOT dead. Which would you prefer: nostalgia, or continued advancement of the genre?I'm all for continued advancement of the genre, but this advancement isn't only limited to the graphical aspect of the game. Increasing the screen resolution or bringing 3D is a way, but so is introducing new graphical style, like noir for example, introducing new GUI and set of Verbs, introducing a new gameplay experience in an adventure game, new way to deal with puzzles, new way to tell a story or telling new kind of story unseen in the adventure genre before... A game may be visually retro, yet 10 years forward gameplay or storytelling speaking, or may be visually stunning yet 20 years backward gameplay or storytelling speaking.
QuoteI actually have played one or two interactive fiction games before, and I've got three words for you. Obvious Exits Are:
I couldn't agree more with you there. Information in game should be obvious, not subtly hidden somewhere because the creator felt it would be a good idea to make their game not feel like a game. "Obvious exits are:" is as vital as seeing the ressources collected in a RTS, the amount of health in an action game or ammo in a FPS. How many people threw a fit because the amount of health in 1213 was subtly hidden in the heart beat noise?
Quote from: Blueskirt on Mon 19/11/2007 11:33:47
I couldn't agree more with you there. Information in game should be obvious, not subtly hidden somewhere because the creator felt it would be a good idea to make their game not feel like a game. "Obvious exits are:" is as vital as seeing the ressources collected in a RTS, the amount of health in an action game or ammo in a FPS. How many people threw a fit because the amount of health in 1213 was subtly hidden in the heart beat noise?
I didn't. It still told me pretty unambiguously what my health level was. And I also think that "to the east lies a cornfield" is obvious enough to convey that if you want to go to the cornfield, go east. Assuming you actually read the room descriptions, and if you don't, why are you playing IF? Or, perhaps more importantly, if you don't want to read the room descriptions, the game fails for
that reason. I think this is sort of a false dichotomy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dichotomy): deliberately
hiding the exits is bad, so the most obvious presentation must be the optimal one. I disagree.
How important is it to include seperate "look," "talk," and "hands" commands?
Tools, tools, tools. Do you like Xilography? Mosaic? Rokusho? Even though we realize these are only techniques, every one has a definite preference based on his/her experience as a viewer/art consumer.
In europe Xilography was often used to portrait dark, plumbeous themes. Other cultures adopted the same gouges and wood panels to represent joyful and "light" atmospheres.
Same goes with any GUI: it is a mean to achieve a result. The "look", "talk", "push", etc. interface is so malleable that it is difficult to think a game that won't be adequately served by it. Still I feel that for newcomers, it can be a little bit stodgy because they're not used to it.
Getting away from that metphisical speculation, the larger the audience, the simplier things have to be. I think Ghost showed (http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=31851.0) us how to freshen up a old goldie like the SCUMM GUI leaving intact its enormous potential.
Again, if you need this kind of palette to design your adventure game is a question which can't be answered with a monosyllabic word. For sure there's lot of space for daring experiments.
Do I really need to worry about the 286s in the audience?
As many wise forumers have said before me, big files needs convincing reasons and would probably turn away a casual gamers. Small is smart, small is reliable, small is sexy.
How comfortable are you with me tainting the Adventure Game format with other genres?
AGS was pushed in the past years beyond so many boundaries it seemed a chamaleont. It is not a difficult prophecy to make: the chemical reaction between the titanic efforts of Chris Jones on the 3.0 version and the ideas of many brilliant AGSers' minds will burst high and shining in the sky. Don't forget popcorns.
Let's agree that Adventure Games are NOT dead. Which would you prefer: nostalgia, or continued advancement of the genre?
Adventures gamers are curious by nature and if the cheese smells good they won't shun it. There is no better audience for enterprising advancements.
Good luck with your work and try to be as blasphemous as you can! ;)
AGS Poker?! :o AGS Mahjong?!?! :o Let me know where to find them!
Interesting discussion here. Making a commercial game is very different from making a freeware one, if only because there's so much work to do after you finish the game! It takes a long time to build any business, and you're bound to be a bit overwhelmed and discouraged at first. I started Wadjet Eye Games over a year ago, and it's only now starting to seriously take off. The games were successful in terms of reviews and publicity, but they never became financially successful until they went on the casual game portals last month.
If you want to go the casual game audience route, there are some things to keep in mind.
1 - Casual portals prefer games that are cute, light and funny. There are exceptions, but they are not as eager to take risks on games that are untested. It took me 6 months to convince one portal to take Blackwell. They gave me the runaround for ages.
2 - They like games with female characters. It might have taken them ages to put Blackwell up, but they wouldn't even look at Shivah. I'm currently writing a game for a portal and their first major change to the design was "make the lead character female."
3 - The byword in casual games is "simpler = better" and to provide as many things to click on as possible (the term "click per reward ratio" is something I recently learned).
The more I look at the casual game market, the more it looks like adventure games are the next "big casual craze." in 2005, it was all pretty puzzle games like Bejewelled. In 2006, the craze was all task-managing games (usually involving a struggling businesswoman, like Flo in Diner Dash). This year the big trend is Hidden Object games like Mystery Case Files.
Point-and-click adventure games seem to be a natural progression from the hidden object games, which are essentially point-and-click fests but without any thought behind them. The best-selling hidden object gamesare the ones that involve more story and characters. Dream Chronicles, for example, is a huge seller that has a pretty good story, and they want more games like it.
Anyway, I have tons of opinions on this subject but I'll shut up. :) If you want to talk about this further feel free to PM me.
-Dave
Wow. Shit. I didn't know that "casual games" meant "we censor action games or games written with male players in mind." I thought "causal" just meant "indie budget games." Fook Mi. So much for that route.
More than one reply has pointed out a "false dichotomy" in my original thinking. This is good. I need more of that. I tend to want hard & fast rules or a formula-driven design for Adventure Games, simply because virtually every time I have ever gotten stuck in an adventure game, it was because the next step in whatever puzzle I was working on was an exception to the rule. You wouldn't expect an RPG fight 2/3 of the way through an FPS, so why would I want a sudden unescapable action sequence in which I have 2 seconds to pick up the screwdriver and jam it into the monster's eye socket, when the closest save I can make is 50 paragraphs of dialogue ago, the screwdriver is 6 pixels by 2 pixels, and the cursor is even invisible until it's time to "do it right now exactly right or die."
So, any twist on the genre I do is probably gonna be formulaic and tightly integrated into the game design. For example, if I were going to make an adventure game with real-time combat in it, I'd START the game with a boxing match you can safely lose a few times without dying, and then once the player has gotten the hang of combat, he can go and solve puzzles and get into elaborate swordfights with fanged & clawed monsters or whatever.
Six Days a Sacrifice wasn't so bad, because death wasn't "death," it was just a puzzle restart. And hey, that's fine, too. You get all the immediacy of a predatory murderer chasing you through the halls, without any of the frustration of losing progress you didn't save or seeing the same stupid Game Over screen and title screen 10 times in a row. Some action games do this, too. For example in Serious Sam 2, there's only one spot in the entire game where you need to jump over a pit of spikes. If you screw up once, it teleports you back up to the ledge you jumped from. The second time, it just saps a little of your health. It's a very tricky jump, you see, and the jump key is mostly optional in a FPS like SS2. So they minimize the penalty for making noobish mistakes involving the game's more esoteric gameplay features.
Let's call this philosophy, I dunno, "novelty normalization." The rarer a particular challenge is in a game, the less of a penalty should be associated with failing it, especially the first time it's thrust upon the player.
Ah. Well the "casual game" is definitely a genre, so when you said you wanted to write a game for the casual market I assumed that's what you meant. :)
Usually it means simple, easy-to-pick-up games that you can play for five minutes or five hours. Games your mom could play, for example. :) The biggest audience for these games are women over 40. The sheer numbers playing these games are astronomical. Check out Playfirst (http://www.playfirst.com) or Big Fish Games (http://www.bigfishgames.com) for more examples of what typical casual games are.
Interesting. I had no idea it was a genre. I think probably because my first exposure to the term was on a blog about game design, in an article touting the innovation going on in the "casual games market." He made it sound like a newly-evolving branch of the video game sector; a new market taking creative risks and attracting new customers. I'm actually kinda disappointed to discover that it actually means "making games for middle-aged women," and knock-off clones, at that. How annoying.
Quote from: WarpZone on Wed 21/11/2007 17:08:52Interesting. I had no idea it was a genre.
Has been a growing market for quite a while yet, and even has an own Wikipedia entry. Just enter "Casual Game"- and you may find the link to the "Casual Game White Paper" interesting; it hs a pretty detailed breakdown of the genre rules.
Quote from: WarpZone on Wed 21/11/2007 17:08:52
I'm actually kinda disappointed to discover that it actually means "making games for middle-aged women," and knock-off clones, at that. How annoying.
Whoa. Steady here, that might be the main target group, but it's a bit harsh and rushed to generalise. Knock-off clones's a bit hard too. Let's say that casual games are simple games, and the differences between two games might be small- but I found that small changes in a small ruleset can make quite a large difference. Take Zuma and Luxor (both free downloads at gamehouse.com). In both games you collapse lines of coloured balls by shooting additional balls into the line and "match 3". In Zuma you play from a central position and can only rotate. Luxor gives you a breakout-like paddle. Both games feel quite different.
Quote from: WarpZone on Wed 21/11/2007 16:01:31
I didn't know that "casual games" meant "we censor action games or games written with male players in mind."
There *are* action casual games. I could name a good dozen. There are also casual games with a more "manly" theme than you basic Diner Dash (a game I actually enjoy quite a lot). If you don't know "Casual Games" as a genre, at least refrain from all these rushed generalisms. How can you judge something you don't even know the name for? That really feels a bit inappropriate.
Sorry, had to be said.
Sorry Ghost. You're right, I shouldn't generalize. That was a knee-jerk response to what I was hearing. I wanted to hear "casual games are video games that are making a profit despite low development costs and experimenting with dynamic new gameplay tropes." Then someone tells me "casual games are actually just a very narrow subset of video games, so narrow that they comprise a single genre, they're only selling to a very specific type of customer, and the people running the casual games portals aren't interested in anything new or different, or anything that might be confused with a mainstream game." Kind of a disappointment. I expressed that disappointment in the form of a hissy fit. I apologize, and I hope to control my mouth better in the future.
Getting back on track, it seems like players want reasonably logical puzzles, no obscure, tiny, or hidden buttons, incentives to explore, non-linear game flow, and if possible, a text-parser interface.
My own personal preferences lean towards the simplest possible interface, colorful textual content even in the most dead-end of item combinations, a clean, concise interface that makes it perfectly clear what you can and can't do, the best graphics I can produce, and as little wasted content as possible. (I.E. create an elaborate animation sequence for the climactic final confrontation with the villian, not Use Key In Door.) And no 20 minute dialogue sequences that segue into an action sequence where you have a split second to react before the bad guy kills you.
Did I miss anything?
Well, if another popular thread is any indication, you should probably put some boobies in there somewhere.
But seriously, one thing that's often overlooked is having an interesting main character. Most indie game characters wind up having no personality or being rip-offs of popular adventure game archetypes- gruff detective, wise-cracking doofus, etc. I've found from personal experience while making my game that its really hard finding ways to express my character's personality without just telling the audience what he's all about. Of course, characters that are unique are the ones that end up being memorable, so it's worth putting some thought into while you're busy worrying about big-picture things like the interface.
Don't get me wrong, I love a good parser as much as anyone who grew up playing the classics, but you might not be getting a realistic view of that particular issue here.
I might go as far as to claim that a large quotient of the current gaming public would quite certainly prefer a mouse driven interface instead, and even those of us who like parsers hold no aversion towards a good adventure game without one. I'd also find it logical if a game with a text based interface was less appealing to gamers/potential customers with less than perfect English skills. A text parser will definitely make good translations harder to produce, and a bad one can obviously wreak havoc on playability. The additional effort required to create the game in the first place is something else you might want to consider.
It's hard to compare adventure games to casual games, because adventure games are highly dependant on plot and writing to make them work. As such, what makes them "popular" is very subjective.
There's no real "magic formula" to selling games, so don't worry too much about making the type of game that will sell. You'll drive yourself crazy if you do that. Just make a game put it up for sale! You'll find your audience as you go along. Once your game is out and selling, try and keep track of who is buying your game. Break it down in terms of age group, geographical location, male/female, etc. You'll start to notice trends eventually. Once you determine who your customers are (i.e., who is buying your game and coming back for more), try and find the best ways to reach more of them.
Oddysseus: Don't confuse thread popularity with topic-of-thread popularity. A topic could be half popular, half infamous, and the discussion thread will be full of people chiming in on the subject. That said, you're right, even if you were being ironic. Sex sells. Always has. But how you present it has a huge effect on what audience will react to it.
I totally agree with you about the need for a compelling main character. My favorite Number Days a Noun game was probably 5 days a Stranger, and I'm almost positive the reason was because Trilby was so utterly Trilby about everything that he did. Apprentice II featured a very iconic art style that extended to the main character, but his behavior and dialogue seemed a little unexceptional. I suppose he was sarcastic in his understated little way, and maybe with voices it would have conveyed that more, and maybe Apprentice 1 did a more solid job of introducing the character, (I habven't played Apprentice 1 yet,) and so I guess a more relaxed characterization was to be expected the second time around. But my absolute favorite Adventure game of all time has got to be Sam & Max. Because Sam is just so Sam, and Max is so very Max.
An interesting exception to this is the "First Person" adventure games, which might not even have a main character, or if they do, he or she keeps quiet and seldom says anything. These games try to maximize immersion, and tend to tell the story of a setting, not a character, and mysterious events long-since transpired. In some ways, this is more honest than a game that tries to relate the adventures of a protagonist, and pass his or her experiences off as the player's. Newer Flash "escape-the-room" games are usually done in this style, but they can sometimes lead to the impression that there is no story, and none is neccessary, and that escaping the locked room by finding and manipulating common household objects is the sole purpose of the game. This is not always the case. If you doubt that First-Person Adventure games can have a compelling story, I highly recommend anything by Mateusz-Skutnik (http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/388589). (Except of course for Submachine 4, which was a deliberate tangent focusing on the puzzle aspect of the series. Submachine 4 is still great fun, mind you, but it doesn't do much from a story perspective, except when considered as a component of the ongoing series.)
Tube: Good points, all. That's exactly the kind of reality check that I need from time to time. In a way, it reenforces my own leanings: that I shouldn't bother with a text-parser game unless it adds something to the game that could not exist in any other form. Something other than the gameplay fundamentals explicitly enforced by the fact that "it's a text-parser game," I mean. Just because Trilby's Notes was the most popular game in the series, it doesn't mean gamers or even the AGS crowd are dying for parser games. There are lots of other factors at work, not least of which is the return of a very well-written and iconic protagonist.
Dave: Truer words were never spoken. Just make the game that you would like to play! It's common sense, yet how easy it is to forget this! Even acting as an independant developer, I find that I gravitate towards communities like the AGS community. That's both a helpful resource, and a potential crutch. Feedback is essential to any game development project, of course, but design can not begin with feedback. Eventually, I'm gonna need to create a protagonist, an environment, and a story from scratch. And while inspiration could come from anywhere, it's not possible to mine it out of a forum thread.
Quote from: WarpZone link=topic=32976So, what's the deal with adventure games?
Are they adventures or games?
How important is it to include seperate "look," "talk," and "hands" commands?
Not at all. In Sierra and LucasArts games, we, the players, had no choice but to use them. Revolution Software (the guys who did Lure of the Temptress, Beneath a Steel Sky, Broken Sword) used a terrible multi-choice system in Lure, but opted for a two-click system (use/look) for their subsequent games, and I myself am a huge fan of that system. So much that I'm using it in my own game, and it just works. No useless verbs, just what you need. Though the verbcoin was a good change in LucasArts interface too, with use/look/talk.
Do I really need to worry about the 286s in the audience?
I don't think so, no, heh. The FAQ question is probably just a remnant of the past. Current AGS releases don't even support DOS builds anymore, and therefore wouldn't run on a 286 if you tried. You can assume that most people have at least a 500-600 Mhz machine, which should be enough to run a higher-res game on. Maybe not 100% smooth in the case of 800x600, but most will be able to.
Even download size matters less nowadays, with broadband widely used. 10 megs, to me, is a couple of seconds if the server is fast, and I have a mediocre connection compared to most of the people I know :P
How comfortable are you with me tainting the Adventure Game format with other genres?
I have no strong opinion about it one way or another. It's your pickle jar, and you can do whatever you want with it. If it's good, it's good. If not, then not. But judging based on a preconception is generally not a very good thing. Taint it!
Let's agree that Adventure Games are NOT dead. Which would you prefer: nostalgia, or continued advancement of the genre?
I refuse to choose, because both have merit. I love nostalgic games that make me go "oh my god, it's like a LucasArts classic!" like Bernie's games, but I also love good, modern games like Spoonbeaks Ahoy :) One should create what one wants to. If it's done well, it'll find fans.
How important is it to include seperate "look," "talk," and "hands" commands?
Not very, its just a familiar game mechanic. For my game, I've spent a lot of time finetuning the GUI system. Before, I had 'walk', 'look', 'talk' and 'use'. I quickly abandoned a dropdown where you select the modes, but scrolling through them with the right mouse button introduced the 'Sam & Max issue' (you click too fast and miss the cursor mode you want, resulting in having to click through them all again). So I had a sort of verb-coin that opened on RMB to select the cursor, and I favoured that for a long time, but there where some impracticalities. So in the end I settled on a two-click system. Although also not perfect, I find this the most intuitive and easy-to-use system.
Do I really need to worry about the 286s in the audience?
No, but you'd do good to not stuff too much performance-hogging stuff into your game. Undoubtedly the newer versions of AGS perform better, but I built and tested my 640x480 game on an 2Ghz computer with 1 Gig of RAM, had everything tuned to perfection, until I tested it on my new 2.4Ghz dualcore laptop with 2 Gig or RAM, where it ran about 10 fps faster(it maxed on 40 so it might be more). Mind you this was windowed mode, so fullscreen it's probably not even an issue.
How comfortable are you with me tainting the Adventure Game format with other genres?/
Let's agree that Adventure Games are NOT dead. Which would you prefer: nostalgia, or continued advancement of the genre?
I applaud this movement. I love the classics as much as the next person here, but personally I always try to introduce new elements to my games. I'm always worried this sounds a little pretentious (and I don't have much to show for it yet), but wherever I can I try to avoid clichés and twist things so that they seem new and fresh. It's hard to find things that haven't been done in games these days, but if you look purely at the genre of adventure games there are still plenty of opportunities to explore. Basically the only thing that matters is if it results in a good game.