Adventure Game Beginnings Question

[miguel]

"Better yet have the entire opening be playable. The daughter is standing there, your father tells the housekeeper to tell you to pick up your bag, you do it. If you don't or trying to do something else the housekeeper will reprimand you. You have to get and wear your hat. Close up your bag. Say goodbye to your pet dog. Try to speak to your father. Get some dialog out of the housekeeper... Stuff like that. When you're father walks outside with your bags you have to GET BAG and then WALK outside. The player has to, not the cutscene. All with gentle prodding from the housekeeper to make sure you know what to do. "Better follow him out there love, it's best not to disobey him again, not after what happened..."

Now, that makes me want to play that game! Great thinking Mr.Colossal.

[Adamski]

I'm struggling with the info-dump problem right now and I think while writing this post I just decided that if I feel like I'm saying too much in the beginning... Just cut it. Tell the character the important stuff they need to know now and forget about the back story. The back story can be sprinkled throughout the game.

This is exactly the same problem I've been having with Oswyn, and I think it's absolutely crucial to avoid infodumping at the start of a game because as soon as the player gets overwhelmed with text the "Sorry, Don't Care!" switch gets flicked and you find yourself reaching for the alt+f4 combination. It's a nightmare to balance, but I'd definatly advocate cutting down any introduction to it's bare minimum yet still keeping the elements that will engage the player, and then finding ways to reveal all the juicy back-story and details of the 'world' you've created for your characters through interactions and whatnot that the person playing the game has control over.

It's dangerously easy to waffle on and on in adventure games - not just in the introduction - so it can really help to take a step back and ask yourself if you're making things too wordy and uninteresting!

[MoodyBlues]

Gilbert's VERY BAD THING:  Spellbound did it, hooray!

Moodyblues, let me expand on your brief description of your opening.

Don't have the argument at all. Have the father and daughter in a tense scene in the foyer of the house, lamps are lit and things are clean but cozy. Maybe a housekeeper is there. The father speaks very little as if to signify that everything that can possibly be said has been said. The Housekeeper or whatever fiddles with the daughter's coat and explains little things to her "Don't go being a bother." "Speak when spoken too..." "...Stay out of trouble... Please..."The daughter is all packed and the room is dark, it is just about dawn. The daughter tries to apologize when a caller arrives at the door. The father, barely looking at her picks up her bags and brings them outside, the daughter follows him carrying her own smaller bag, the housekeeper bursts into tears...

Outside a huge dark carriage is waiting, lit torches in sconces are hanging, the sun is JUST about to break over the horizon, the horses are pawing at the ground and breathing into the chilly air. The father throws the bags on the back of the carriage, talks to or pays the Man In Charge, the Man In Charge gently pushes the daughter into the carriage, gets in, closes the door, reaches out the window and pats the side of the carriage and they leave.

6 days later we open on the daughter in her new room, starkly different from the house she just left.

The daughter obviously did something bad if her father won't even look at her let alone he's sending her away. After we gain control of her in the new room we can have her talk to other people or other people gossip about her and we'll learn why she was there. People's reactions to her will show us that what she did wasn't just break a window, people stop talking when she enters a room, etc...

Better yet have the entire opening be playable. The daughter is standing there, your father tells the housekeeper to tell you to pick up your bag, you do it. If you don't or trying to do something else the housekeeper will reprimand you. You have to get and wear your hat. Close up your bag. Say goodbye to your pet dog. Try to speak to your father. Get some dialog out of the housekeeper... Stuff like that. When you're father walks outside with your bags you have to GET BAG and then WALK outside. The player has to, not the cutscene. All with gentle prodding from the housekeeper to make sure you know what to do. "Better follow him out there love, it's best not to disobey him again, not after what happened..."

Just a quick thing that popped into my mind, I'm a much more visual thinker and when it comes to trying to explain something I default to pictures and mood and not words.

So that's a long post but I think it fits the topic of this thread.

Dang, those are some awesome ideas, especially the playable introduction part with the prodding from NPCs.  

I guess I should have mentioned that in this game (ah heck with it, it's Forces of Nature), the father is the player character, not the daughter.  (I considered making her the ego, but "young human living with non-human adoptee" protagonists are too common.)  And the daughter is very young, about six years old.  

And the "very bad thing" situation is a bit complicated and forces the father to balance his loyalties to his blood family and his adopted daughter.  And poor Dad is the kind of person who hates conflict and would sacrifice anything to make everyone happy.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

I think the intro to Indy FOA was a brilliant way to start the game. The way you went through the college to find the statue thing and the fact it wasnt always in the same place. A good action start. And you played it.

I guess I'm one of the few people that didn't like the intro.  I felt it made Indy look like a clumsy oaf, and if I want a clumsy oaf I can always play Monkey Island...by the same people!


As far as beginnings go, anything that properly establishes the plot and gets you involved in the story is fine by me.  I'm more interested in the core gameplay and story than an intro, and you can't always gauge the quality of a game by an intro.  I've played many games that were great that had fairly short or just weak introductions, and I think some genres do better than others in that respect.