GTD(?): Handheld Adventure Games

Started by Snarky, Fri 31/12/2004 20:03:10

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jaz

#20
Well, I didn't change my mind I only got the oportunity to see the problem from a different perspective.

First of, your first post is excellent. Very thought out and well written and covers almost all theoretical aspects of possible mobile adventure gaming.

I am still extremelly enthusiastic about mobile entertainment and I still DO think that mobile adventures can get off the ground and possibly be very entertaining.

The problem is not the games but the industry. Imagine you are a commercial mobile developer. Each project you take the risk and quite naturally you tend to limit it as much as possible. If this is what you do for living, there's no wonder you choose the safe way and go for good ol'shooters... Yes it's the thing we all hate Lucas Arts for now. Rules of free market are cruel.

But this is not the only reason. It takes ages to make a decent adventure game. There are things like script and dialogues that need to be done first no matter if the game is designed for PC or cellphone. The other parts of adventure development are time demanding too. But hey, mobile games life cycle is very short and counts in only weeks or at most a few months. The "AAA" titles can be alive for maybe almost a year before their time is over. And within this time period the game has to make enough profit to actually pay while it's still on first pages of internet software portals.

It's easy to knock down a Speccy remake in few weeks and the sad thing is that it will attract more customers than a solid and thought out adventure game the authors spent last 10 months of development on. And you have to consider the price you can charge for your game which will be downloadable over the air or through internet. It can be as low as 2 or 5 Dollars or Euros, most likely not more than 9,99 to remain competitive... Can this pay?

For example The Broken Sword, one of the best adventure games of all time was ported to Gameboy and flopped. Gilbert Goodmate, another good adventure had been ported to Pocket PC and while it did much better, still it wasn't anything to shout about.

Now my personal favourite: cellphones. I only saw a few adventures on these devices, I remember some X.Files game and that was pretty much all. Of course there are ports of Sierra classics but it doesn't quite count.

The thing is that Ã, while there are smartphones and there are already millions of users of these gadgets already, the main consumer group still consists of lower end mobile users. The most common mobile gaming devices are java enabled Nokia Series 40 phones. The screen resolution is 128 x 128 which is hardly enough for adventure games. But it's not the main problem, it could do. Mobile Java (J2ME) is. These phones are not equipped with operation system and Java as originaly a cross-platform language is very limited. Some phones have also a maximum file size limit which varies from 50 - 100 kB. In these cases I have a limit of roughly 50 kB for ALL the ingame GFX! Even without this limit it's not much more than 100 kB. This is a big obstacle, at least it seems like it to me.

Of course this is not an issue with smartphones now and technological limitations of low end handsets will disappear but again there always is the question, will it pay??? The competition is tough and for a taste of things to come in mobile gaming check out SP Mark 2005 (Smartphones benchmark).

Also nature of point and click adventure is specific. Time consuming as they are these are better suited for long rainy afternoons when you have nothing to do than for ocassional boring bits of time you have to kill, bits which are best to be filled by mobile entertainment... You dealt with this problem well in your first post so that everybody can see the point. It's not the lenght of the game but the progress that has to be done to keep the player interested that matters. To be stuck in adventure game in supermarket line is not exactly what we are looking for, right? There are lenghty and complex mobile games that are very popular - RPGs, RTSs, Pocket Kingdom for instance. But in these games you can always make at least a little progress in a short period of time.


But there is still hope. I think this opens field for non-conventional adventures.
Hell, if people like RPGs on mobiles and love logical games why wouldn't they accept an adventure which is something between these two? A properly designed adventure, that is.

In my oppinion Gobliiins are the type of game that could do well on mobile...

Ufff... I'm tired, I will stop now... Laters.



Czar

I think you explained the best GUI for touch screens (and wider) with your last sentence (not the I'm tired one).

For those who dont know, Gobliiins (i,ii & iii) work on a one click interface.
So, one click can still make it challenging in the hands of a well thought desinger. Hmm yeah. I hope that sentence had sense.

C.
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Rui 'Trovatore' Pires

Weeeeelll... Gobliiins is really a puzzle game, not an adventure.

I, for one, would love to play adventures on my mobile... BUT I understand most "moblie players" want something that doesn't tax them overmuch in terms of attention and whatnot - a game in a mobile is not an experience, but a passtime. That makes Gobliiins PERFECT... and yet, it's not an adventure game but a puzzle game.

In short... only die-hard adventure gamers would play mobile adventures, and even they... I mean, just look at the market for hand-held games. Everything since super mario to sonic to tomb raider GB and... well, EVERYTHING is meant to be quickly consumed. Only a few games dared be a bit more, games like Pokemon and some RPGs... but even they were... well, nothing much, frankly. And didn't involve the sort of... "being drawn into the story". Another reason for their sucess, I presume.

...heh. My "in short section" got too long. :P In REALLY short, true adventure is probably not possible at all... but adventure-ish puzzle games like Gobliiins are ideal.
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Snarky

#23
Commercial adventure games, for me, is just a secondary concern. If we start to see amateur-made games of AGS quality on mobile phones I'll be more than happy.

OK, I accept that you have to be quite an optimist to believe that mobile phones will bring commercial success to adventure games. What Jaz says about the economics of game development is true. However, most of it is true for PC and console games too. So it shouldn't make less sense to make adventure games for mobile phones than it does for PCs.

I spent last week in Vegas, attending the Consumer Electronics Show, CES (I work for a company in the consumer electronics business). I had a chance to attend two sessions that are somewhat relevant here. One was on Mobile Gaming (i.e. games for cell phones) and the other on Casual and Downloadable Games (mostly internet games). I learned some very interesting things and got some new ideas for how to take advantage of mobile devices.

The real reason to hope for some commercial mobile adventure games is that the potential market is much bigger than the market for PC games. There are 1.7 billion people in the world using mobile phones today, and 10% of those, 170 million people, play games on their phone. That's several times more than the number of people who play computer games on their PC. With a market that size, even a small niche for adventure games could prove profitable.

When I find time, I'll put together a basic J2ME library and API for writing adventure games. The cool thing about doing it in Java is that if it's carefully designed, a game could be run on most mobile devices, on a webpage as an applet, and as an application on your computer. I'm not making any promises, so don't wait for me to finish this if you're thinking of making a mobile adventure game.

PS: The kind of game I think could work on mobile phones is something like 'Little Johnny Evil'. Short, funny adventure games with a focus on puzzles more than story.

Snarky

I've been snooping around the net, and discovered that there's quite a few handheld adventure games available already:


Has anyone played the games from HoT or MagiXoft? How do the interfaces work?

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