So, what's the deal with adventure games?

[WarpZone]

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.

[Ghost]

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 
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!

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

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).

[scotch]

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 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.

[Ali]

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!

[WarpZone]

Wow, thanks for the quick feedback.  

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.

[Ghost]

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.

[EldKatt]

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.

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.

[WarpZone]

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.

[InCreator]

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.

[scotch]

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.

[Ghost]

... did... did you call it Direct3D?  :o

I had the same expression as that smiley when I first heard about it 

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.

[WarpZone]

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!

[Ghost]

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?

[bicilotti]

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.

[WarpZone]

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.

[Radiant]

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".

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.

[Ghost]

A little bird told me it's better to surprise everyone with a release than to build anticipation and then cancel a project.

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.

[WarpZone]

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."

[Ghost]

Hm, might as well put it directly here.

Curses

WinFrotz

Enjoy.