Useless Rooms

[Tuomas]

Is there going to be lots and lots of detailed eating of splendid cuisine?

I have always had fantasies of a game that would include a whole city. Up to the point where I almost travelled to Budapest with a digital camera, taking pictures of every building and later pixellise over them to build a miniature central to a real city for exploring purposes. Of course, this game wouldn't have a plot or a topic or a goal, but it would be awesome to just go about looking at stuff Like a tourist guide that would disable the need of going abroad for seeing things!

Actually, if I were a city architect, I might just do this for training purposes, and to provide means to people to base a whole number of games into a readymade city of dreams!

[GarageGothic]

You do realize, that graphics has to be really good if you want the game to be fully enjoyable Since urbex is 60% gfx.

Hehe, yeah. I know you're at least partly kidding, but I do agree that graphics are an important part of the atmosphere. And I think that they will be up to par - you should see the dust-caught-in-the-flashlight-beam particle effects  . The big challenge will be to make each room feel unique and interesting to explore without losing the maze-like feel of the city and its buildings.

Tuomas, I'm sure there's gonna be a trattoria or two in the game . Did you ever hear about the game A Quiet Weekend in Capri? They did pretty much what you're talking about, except they used the photos directly as in-game screens. While the game isn't amazing (I'm not too fond of node-based first-person adventures) it does indeed create a true feeling of almost unlimited exploration.

Ok, that's enough off-topic for now. Sorry 'bout that, Jeopardy.

[radiowaves]

I was not joking. When i don't feel the rust eating away the metal rack that is blocking my way, or crusting down paint on the walls, dusty and smoked bricks, ashes collected in the corners, half rotten wood pillars etc, its all in vain. If there are areas of useless exploration, there has to be at least something worth the effort to keep players going.

[GarageGothic]

Indeed. I've been visiting quite a few photo galleries of urban explorers on the web, and decaying buildings are among my own favorite photography motives when I travel abroad. Especially the organic textures of crumbling or water damaged walls. I have tons of reference photos from my own trip to Venice (I may visit again while working on the game now that I got a 4GB memory card for my camera). While I'm not going to use photos as game backgrounds, I consider adding a collector minigame where some rooms have "photo spots" where you can use your in-game camera to take similar pictures of building details.

[Quintaros]

Based on the background art I've seen for Shadowplay, I have faith, GarageGothic, in your ability to create graphics compelling enough for the type of gameplay you and radiowaves are discussing.

[jamicus]

I guess there are a few minds about this and there isn't really a correct answer.

One point is that if there are one or two rooms which are "pointless", then it is probably just going to confuse the person who is playing because everything else in the game has a purpose. It depends on your design techniques, I guess. Like, if there were loads of rooms in your game and only half of them actually served to advance the central plot or were critical to do so then the player would probably pick up quite quickly that your game was one where exploration was encouraged and not everything had to mean something.

That could get confusing, or a bit overwhelming but when I play adventure games I am mostly looking to soak up all dat atmosphere, you know the walking around looking at backgrounds and listening to music etc. I'm not always in a huge hurry to move onward, although it sucks getting stuck or lost and the more optional rooms there are the more likely that is to happen.

So I think the best thing would be, if you were to put in any amount of optional rooms at all, have some kind of marker for rooms which are necessary, you know, like a map where plot necessary rooms have exclamation points or whatever over them.

Or the optional rooms could provide alternative ways of achieving goals - this is the most complex and time consuming optional, and of course that means it's the most interesting and probably best for the game.

Also, you don't need to make a separate room for like, shop fronts. Why not just have an animated background where you can see inside the windows and get a glimpse of the activity in the shop? That kind of thing can give you little chills if it's done right, like in Broken Sword II down at the docks? I love those backgrounds, with the little spots of light darted around, just hinting at life and activity and not showing you it up front. That stuff can be pretty uh, titilating, I guess!