So, what's the deal with adventure games?

[bicilotti]

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 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!

[Dave Gilbert]

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

[WarpZone]

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.

[Dave Gilbert]

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 or Big Fish Games for more examples of what typical casual games are.

[WarpZone]

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.

[Ghost]

Interesting.  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.

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.

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.

[WarpZone]

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?

[Oddysseus]

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.

[tube]

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.

[Dave Gilbert]

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.

[WarpZone]

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. (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.

[ildu]

So, what's the deal with adventure games?

Are they adventures or games?

[voh]

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

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.

[hedgefield]

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.