Dead Areas

[stuh505]

What are peoples opinions on 'dead areas'?  AKA, nothing to do here areas.  Some games have a lot of these areas...where perhaps there is just something that looks interesting, but provides no game information, or maybe it's just a forest to set the mood.  I am trying to have as few of these as possible...and trying to put something interesting on at least every place.  But how many filler areas do you think there should be between the important areas?

[Scummbuddy]

youll have to remember that if you are either asking an artist to do these for free, they may not want to do so many, as it will eat up their time. Maybe they will want to do it, since it will give them more practice, or they may like the scene idea that you have.

if you are paying a person to do it, you  will have to ask yourself if it is worth the money to make the scenes. 

now, in my opinion, if you make a scene, such as a long path to get to a mansion, i would think it to be odd to have you walk the whole thing, since you know the person is just going to either go to it, or away, so if you made me walk it, i would try everything i could in that area, just to see why i was put there, or allowed to be there.

[stuh505]

at this point I'm doing all the graphics myself. 

it's a lot easier to not add any fluff areas

but then I look at a game like kings quest where 90% of the areas are "nothign to do there", and I wonder...maybe I should spread things out a bit...

[GarageGothic]

I'm going to start a series of game theory discussions soon, taking a filmmaker's approach to game development. One of the discussions will be on "editing", which includes, amongst other things, some thoughts on what you call "dead areas".

My idea is that you shouldn't waste the player's time with walking through empty screens, as Syberia tends to do. Especially games that involve walking back and forth through the game world, such as Simon the Sorcerer and some sections of Other Worlds, need to learn something from film editors.

In Shadowplay, I've taken the approach that most interior locations  need exteriors to establish the building and the neighborhood. This is known as an "establishing shot" in film editing. And once you've shown it, there's really no need to show it again. Hence, it's shown at the first visit to the location, but when the player leaves the interior, he skips straight to the map. One location is a hotel, where one of the NPCs is staying. The hotel consists of four screens - exterior, lobby, hallway, room. There are puzzles to find the right room, get into the elevator and convice the NPCs to let you into his room. But once you get in, you will never see the lobby or hallway again - unless it's needed for plot development (perhaps the NPC doesn't open the door one morning...).

If you think the "dead areas" really have no purpose, scrap them. But if they add atmosphere and helps establish location and character, by all means keep them in. The real question is when to let the player skip past them.

[Babar]

I had asked a question like this before here. I asked which is better- map screens, or "dead areas" (as you call them).
The thing with map screens is that you start off at a main area, and from there you can go to all the other areas directly, without all the dead areas.
GarageGothic has an interesting idea about having those areas show only once, and then not again. It could even work like that with puzzles- once you have done all you need to in a certain area, you don't need to go there again.

However, I am not so sure about that idea. It would seem like a restriction of my freedom to not be able to go to a certain area once I have visited already. It would feel like I am missing something. For example, the bridge scene in Monkey Island 1 (with the red herring): Once I finished that puzzle, I greatly irritated me that I could not go there again.

[Helm]

dead areas are good when the player doesn't know they're dead. If the game is based around exploration and survival as well as puzzles and plot development, like early sierra games, rooms where you don't 'do things' but just navigate the environment, evade danger and get going are fine in my opinion. This serves another issue which is HORRIBLE in adventure game logic. The 'ok, what do I have to do in THIS room' thinking. Players who are accustomed to every room being vital to the continuation of the game, might solve puzzles prematurely, or collect objects they didn't know they needed, simply because the click on everything on everything in every room by habit. This is a design flaw. You need to take the player's mind away from solving puzzles sometimes, and remind him in others. On the other hand, you have the Simon 1 problem, where the main character walks so slow, and you have to traverse through pretty, but long rooms to go from point a to point b. I think balanced game design solves both issues. Garage, you are in my opinion wrong to borrow extensively ( in this issue ) from film editing. A film is over in two hours, and the audience knows that, and that's your space to do whatever. An adventure game doesn't. Adventure games are not movies. Adventure games can have a relaxed pace, "dead" rooms, optional stuff to do, and shouldn't always be action-packed and closely cut.

[GarageGothic]

Adventure games can have a relaxed pace, "dead" rooms, optional stuff to do, and shouldn't always be action-packed and closely cut.

I'm all for optional stuff. And sometimes a slower pace benefits a story. I don't expect a Jim Jarmusch film to move at the speed of a Jerry Bruckheimer blockbuster. But on the other hand I'd hate to watch Bruce Willis and his crew smoking cigarettes for 2 hours instead of blasting space rocks.
My main point is: "Don't waste my time". Over the last hundred years filmmaking has developed us a set of  tools to tell a story efficiently, and we'd be fools if we didn't take advantage of those techniques.

[stuh505]

Garage,

I have also been trying to borrow concepts from film...mainly, the 3-act structure.  I think this is a good way to build suspense and make the plot exciting. 

I think I'll end up having some dead areas, to establish soem distance between things, but not too many of them...and I'll try to put some extra goodies like people to talk to, or interesting things to look at on most of them.

Helm, I think you make a good point.  My game has very few item-based puzzles...but I do want my players to learn about the plot and get into the game, which means talking to a lot of non-critical people, and exploring non-critical places, simply to understand the environment they are in.  If I put everyhing too close together they'll end up solving the puzzles simply because they're close together without understanding the plot.

[Helm]

My main point is: "Don't waste my time". Over the last hundred years filmmaking has developed us a set of  tools to tell a story efficiently, and we'd be fools if we didn't take advantage of those techniques.

If your time is so vital and you feel it is wasted by some inbetween rooms, adventure games are not for you, I think. Adventure games aren't about instant gratification, they're about immersion, resonance and paced development. I feel you know all this, but I have to underline some things. Filmmaking has given us a set of tools to tell a story efficiently within the attention span of a viewer in one 2 hour average sitting. Games don't have to be like that. To make another analogy with another somewhat longlived art form, in literature some pieces have many  (more than 3) chapters, sometimes go on for lots of pages simply describing scenery, setting the tone, or in internal monologue that would be out of the question in a filmic format. So let's not be so fast to equate adventure games with movies.

[MillsJROSS]

I think if your going to have to have a dead area, it's going to have fill some purpose. Like if you think there will be a better atmosphere by "opening" the game up, that's fine. However, I prefer the, there's something to do in every room/almost every room. I don't honestly see why taking from a well established media, such as movies, would affect adventure games in the negative. Sure their different...but the concept remains the same. As Garage said, "don't waste my time." I'm the type of gamer that clicks on everything I can find and selects every possible dialog. This isn't to say that there can't be dead areas, movies use dead areas too, they just limit them. Like you might see the main character walk into a shop from outside, but not necessarily see the car ride over there.

The trouble, Helm,  with using old sierra games as an example, is that with the text parser system it was generally very easy to find out if there was something important in the room. And even afterwards, the games weren't hotspot heavy. So it was easy to navigate in a room, type look, find out anything important, if there wasn't anything, move on. Where as todays games are so graphically intensive, that it's hard to pick out what's important in a game. You might have fifteen hotspots to a room, now, versus four or five before.

I don't really care for dead areas...and I'm not so sure it's a design flaw to take out something I don't like.

-MillsJROSS

[Helm]

The early AGI games were a good example of good dead areas. Like space quest 1 and 2. The difference between them and more recent dead areas in games, is that in those old agi games, the art style was homogenized, so you couldn't rightly tell from walking in a room, if there was something you needed or not. You had to look around actively. And walk around, try things without resorting to randomly clicking on everything. The fact that these games were keyboard controlled ment navigating terrain was a gameplay device in itself. Of course dead areas seem a bit annoying in games with keyboard control, no environmental hazards and slow walking speeds like simon 1. But in space quest, I remember really liking walking through the jungle screens, trying to see what was important and what not, minding my step for danger, and generally, taking the atmosphere in. So I guess dead areas are good or bad, depending on the rest of the game design in each case. But I really do think the film analogy isn't really necessary. I'm used to hearing this about comics too. "Look at this panel! It's so... cinematic!" as if a comic has to be like a movie to be good. Comic books can be comic books, and operate on their own set of semiotic stuff, just like adventure games can be adventure games, and not movies. One should be more interested in making a good adventure game on it's own terms, than a cinematic adventure game on another set of terms, not directly related to the genre. The aesthetic of the computer game seems to be out of favour, in place of more and more elaborte attempts to mimic reality, or the next best thing, movies. I do not see why this is always good.

[simulacra]

I agree. The computer aesthetic of simulating reality is one possible mode of computer games, but certainly not the only one or a better one. It all depends on what you are trying to do.

I find the notion of the 'dead' spot a bit self-contradictive, since the passage of time or feeling of space it provides could be very much a living part of the story at hand.

[DCillusion]

Dead Areas work in 1st-person perspective pretty well, but not in 3rd-person.  You should, really, only use dead areas in your game if it's played through the character's eyes.

Take Nancy Drew, or Mist; most of the dead areas are there because you need to get closer or explore further.  In something like King's Quest, everything you can interact with is laid-out in front of you; and distance is unimportant because you're 30 meters in the air - looking down.

[stuh505]

DC, don't you think it's important to establish some level of distance between things?

What if your plotline calls for doing something at 2 geographic locations separated by a couple miles of forest.  Should those 2 areas by adjecent screens?  I think there must be a balance...I'm not going to measure the stride of the character and determine that I need 400 screens inbetween (I've tried making a game like this before for LOTR and it totally sucked because there was no way I could populate that much areas with anything other than grassland)....but don't you think there should be at least 2 or 3 forest screens inbetween?  And this distance could be expanded more by introducing artificial things to occupy the player like interesting things to look at or people to talk to or perhaps tiny little puzzles inbetween...

[DCillusion]

Most 1st-person adventures are about closeness; so often if the distance is more than, like, 20 or 30 meters away - the player is, usually, sent to a map screen.

As far as travelling, 1st-person games have a few places that can be explored along the way, but a lot of it is dead-zone.  I think the trade-off is, or intended to be, that the parts that can be explored are taken much, much further than a third-person game.  Instead of a text description, the player is given 1 or more new screens where the hotspot is fully displayed on the screen.

I not sure if you could give the players as much reward if you had to do that with every inch of the screen.  So it's really just if you like constant gratification, or if you prefer less rewards with bigger pay-offs.  Whatever you're preference.

[Lemonhead]

I guess - as with most things - the question of dead areas is a matter of personal preference.

Personally, I don't see any reason to include time-wasters in a genre that is already widely perceived as 'slow' and 'boring' (compared to most other game genres). I understand the desire to depict distances and long transitions more accurately, but IMHO film cuts or better planned perspectives are far better ways to do that than useless screens that serve no purpose other than to slow the player down.

I'm playing adventure games to be immersed in the story and atmosphere, to give in to my sense of exploration and... well... to be entertained. If the story with all its elements is compressed into the necessary rooms, with every room having at least one functional object, that's fine with me. I really hate things that bog me down like non-skippable text or having to wait for the player character to trudge through numerous screens without the possibility to speed this up. And I'm grateful for features like double-clicking an exit to change the screen instantly, especially when I'm running back and forth through a couple of screens to try some ideas. That doesn't take anything away from the atmosphere, it simply benefits the player's convenience and helps him concentrate on the story, the progress and have more fun along the way.

As I said, I think there's always a better way... a more intelligent solution than using non-functional dead screens that just increase development time and cost without any major advantages. If you wanted to give an impression of a great distance, you could show a looong pathway down a mountain or through the woods in the background, and have the player character only walk the last steps. Or you could fade the screen to black and display some text like '2 hours later...' or 'After a long hike through the woods...'. Or have the player character himself (or herself) comment on it.

I prefer the 'constant gratification' approach that DCillusion mentioned. But that's just me