Messages

Great idea! I think I got 50% so far.

[Indy 3]

I don't like padding either, but from the company's point of view, the price has the price has to reflect the development cost, whereas consumers (or reviewers at least) always expect to get the same "amount" (time-wise) of entertainment. Of course, padding is hardly entertainment, but maybe the customer won't notice. I don't want to justify padding in commercial games, but try to understand the (misguided) mindset for putting it there in the first place, while at the same arguing that it might be unavoidable for commercial games, but should be completely absent from freeware games. For the same price, Indy 3 was much "longer" than Loom and I admit that I might have been disappointed at how short it was, had I bought it at full price, altough I don't doubt that they costed about the same to make. However, I only got them in a compilation together with three other games, so that didn't matter and today, I very much prefer Loom.

And I probably didn't make myself clear about combining inventory items. I, both as a player and as a designer, can't think of a way to combine a pear with a flashlight, so if my testers couldn't think of anything either, they probably shouldn't be combine-able because you can't do it in real life (unless of course you can use magic or a molecular resequencer to make a pear-shaped flashlight or an edible light source). On the other hand, I can think of a way to combine a potatoe and a scredriver, namely by sticking one into the other, forming a potatoe-on-a-stick. That may be a stupid thing to do and I can't think of any possible use of such an item, but seeing the character do it might both be more satisfying (if you wanted to do it) and more discouraging (if you were just trying to combine everything with everything, than just having the character say: "That would be stupid."

This acutally leads organically into my next point (and further away from the topic of puzzle motivation): What is the relationship between the player and the player character? Does the player take the role of the character or is he just a voice in his head? In action games, there is no question about that. I'm the player character and if I press FORWARD he character will move forward and if I press FIRE the character will shoot. In adventure games, all too often, that isn't the case. You can't USE a gun on a NPC and expect your character to actually do it. At best, you'll get a witty response, at worst an "I don't want to do that." What? I didn't ask if you wanted to do it, I wasn't suggesting you to do it, I was ordering you to do it! Of course, adventure game character usually aren't empty shells for the player to fill with personality, but have a personality in their own right, which you shouldn't always be able to override. For example, it would be out-of-character for Guybrush to stab people in the back, but where do you draw the line? Is it OK not to allow sticking screwdrivers into potatoes just because the character (acting as a mouthpiece for the designer) think it's stupid?

Helm, while your points on The Dig are all valid to some extent, I don't see how any of them are the fault of point-and-click interfaces in general or one-click interfaces in particular. Padding exists in parser-driven games as well. Being able to look at everything is a simple matter of making everything that isn't a hotspot a "global" hotspot, like the SCI games and filling dialogue options with a meaning (other than just information) and consequence is able indepented of whether you have clickable multiple-choice lines or ASK and TELL. Of course, with multiple-choice and your options (and maybe even their possible ramifications) become more visible, but is that that much of a problem?

My two cents, part two, section one: Parsers. While parsers are obviously more powerful and flexible than point-and-click interfaces, I prefer the latter because of its comfort and its accessability. Basically, the same reasons why most people are using a graphical user interface for their desktop in favour of command-line interfaces. If you don't have the typing or language skills, parsers are much more annoying to use and even if you do, most parsers lack the comfort I want from such an interface. I haven't yet seen a graphical adventure with a parser that's good enough. I'd prefer a TADS game to an AGI one any day of the week, but tend to prefer graphical point-and-click adventures to both of them.

My two cents, part two, section two: Gameplay. I think that unlike other computer games, adventure games aren't really aren't about gameplay. They are about story. Gameplay in many adventure games is quite poor actually. If you strip away the graphics and the story you realise just how stupid most adventure game puzzles are, regardless of whatever interface is used. Have a look at the discepancies between what games are mentioned in "The greatest Adventure Game of all time..." and the "What are your favorite hated Adventure Game Puzzles" threads. It looks like the best adventure games didn't necessarily have the best puzzles. For example, why is Grim Fandango so popular? Mostly because of its puzzles or mostly because of its writing? What's more important? To me, GF's story is certainly one of the best of what I've seen in computer games, one of the few computer games which's story is comparable to what you'd find in novels or movies, but I can hardly remember any individual puzzle that struck me a being that great. True, there weren't any especially bad puzzles either, but that's just my point. Don't add unnecessary puzzles and puzzles are subordinate to the story.

If I really wanted a game that's mostly about physical puzzles, I'd play The Incredible Machine or if I wanted to push around crates, I'd play Sokoban. Or look at Gobliiins. It has lots of gameplay and little story, in fact so much, that it's almost more of a puzzle game than an adventure game. Loom (which I seem to be mentioning a lot recently) on the other hand, is almost entirely story. Which is the better adventure game? In that sense, Japanese visual novels are like adventure which leave out puzzles entirely in favour of dialogue. Being completely puzzle-free is probably overdoing a bit, but when balancing puzzles and story, you should definitely opt for puzzle-light unless it really, really makes sense in the framework of your story.

In that respect, advances in graphics and story-telling in other genres probably had more to do with the downfall of adventure games, than actual misdevelopments in the genre itself. Today, people bemoan that so many people buy games just because of their graphics, but back in the day, adventure games were among the best-looking games there were. They weren't too hard on the hardware and had huge panoramic background images and relatively large sprites to show off their pixel art. Also, today games from every genre try to have interesting plots, another thing that used to be one of adventure games' strengths.

[Loom]

It took me a while to read all that. Interesting discussing going on here. Here are my two (Euro) cents (or maybe a bit more).

First of all, any puzzle that doesn't flow naturally (and logically) from the main story should be eliminated. I completely agree with what MrColossal said in his first post. The only exception of that rule I can think of are things that flow naturally (and logically) from the game world. Think of it as (optional) sidequests if you want. I really don't like that most adventure games don't let you do anything that's not related to the story, implying that anything you can do has to help you with your main goal somehow, even if it makes no sense.

A collary to that is that you should never ignore or disallow obvious and maybe unexciting, but very sensible solutions, like buying tools or destroying obstacles. A convulted series of actions might seem more interesting at design time, but at play time it is often just frustrating, especially if there'd be an alternative path in real life that just doesn't work in the game.

As to how to design puzzles that feel natural which are also challenging, my advice is: Don't! (Note that I say "design" rather than "engineer" because puzzle making seems more like an art than a science to me.) You shouldn't force puzzles (that don't fit) into your story and puzzles don't have to be challenging to be enjoyable. I think that despite what Helm says, that the story is much more important to an adventure game (not to games in most other genres though), than its gameplay.

I think an adventure game hardly needs any puzzles. Especially if you're making a freeware game. For commercial adventures I can understand the desire to add puzzles to pad out the game and make it appear longer. It might have even been a necessity, for example, I remember magazine reviews of Loom (nowadays often regarded as a classic) complaining how it was too short.

It might be interesting to have a look at the interactive fiction (what used to be called text adventures) community here, who's favourite genre died before ours (maybe even because of ours) and who's independant game making started earlier as well. There, besides traditional text adventures in the tradition of Infocom or Legend, among other experimental games, a new subtype, that of the puzzle-free interactive fiction emerged and also became popular, not replacing puzzle-driven games, but complementing them. Two examples, from the top of my head, would be Adam Cadre's Photopia and 9:05.

Getting back to puzzles, I don't think the type of the interface influences the quality or the difficulty of the puzzles. Especially not the number of verbs. Loom had more than twenty different drafts (counting reversed ones), The Dig had only two (three if you count walk-to). Which's puzzles were more challenging? For me, definitely The Dig's. Before it, I was kinda suspicious of one-click interfaces. Afterwards, not anymore. I can't remember (but, admittedly, it's been a while since I last played it) any situation in which I couldn't do what I wanted to do because of the interface or (which would have been even worse) in which the interface did something I wouldn't have thought of. I was stuck several times without ever having to resort to pointlessly clicking on everything. Even though I ultimately prefer Loom, I like The Dig very much and would really like to hear Helm's ten (or more) ways to make a better game from it.

Don't get me wrong. I do very much appreciate interfaces that deviate from the norm and the normal set of verbs interesting ways, though. It's a very nice touch, that doesn't improve a game by itself, but opens many interesting opportunities, but if you can't design good puzzles with a one-click interface, chances are you won't be able to design good puzzles with a different interface, even though that might give you more possibilities. Remember that the interface should never get in the way of the puzzles, so picking a different interface to make the game more interesting is OK, but doing so only to make it more difficult isn't. Especially if the increase in difficulty stems from the fact that there are now more verbs to experiment with because you won't be able to guess the correct one due to lack of logic.

The next problem is how to prevent the player from stumbling over solutions without effort, be it through pointless clicking or by accident. Here more verbs really might help, but that's still not a sufficient reason on its own to add more verbs. I think this happens most often when the player is trying to combine every item or in dialogues.

Dialogues are a bit tricky because multiple choice by its very nature allows to "solve" the puzzle simply by exhausing all dialogue options, especially, if you don't want to have dead-ends and walking dead. Increasing the size of the dialogue tree is an obvious workaround, but at the same time, a lot of additional work (that might be better utilised elsewhere). Alternatives might be to include loops, so that the player should be aware of what he says instead of just clicking on the first option until it goes away or having characters actually become angry (and unapproachable) if the player does something wrong and remain that way, until a certain amount of time has passed or until the player made some progress elsewhere. It's very important that the player has always something else to do and doesn't have to wait for a character to cool down again after angering him. After all, who wants to spend his free time with waiting?

For the inventory itmes, again the problem is, that in most games you can only combine things to make things that you're going to need and often won't ever have to disassemble them again. If the combination process was non-destructive, then it should always be possible to take things apart again, not matter if it's actually useful or not. There could also be items that you need to use both on their own and a part of a combination of items, so that you have to disassemble them again at some point and that successfully having combined two items without knowing what for doesn't atuomatically equate progress. If combinations can be taken apart again, you might even want to allow nonsensical combinations, like pushing your screwdriver into your potatoe. And, as Helm said, don't automate the combing process too much. If it takes two logical steps to combine two items, let the player perform both.

Basically, my solution here was giving the players more options so trying everything becomes less attractive. This might help a bit, but doesn't really solve the problem. At least not in the way a parser would. Still, I don't think parsers are the solution, neither for verbs, nor dialogue options. I'd like to elaborate on that a bit and I will, but for now, this post's long enough and it's getting late.

On a sidenote, math is interesting. I don't know much about game theory, though.

Hmmmm, this looks hard. I think I can only name one or two from the top of my head. I'll have to think about it over the weekend.

Other than that, I think you should state the deadline explictly and there should be a rule against using search engines. Sure, you can't enforce it, but cheaters would have to live with their conscience. Unless, of course, you're confident that your quiz is Google-proof and want people to try.

May I suggest that the animation, comic, coding and OWOR competitions, the quizzening, the ASCII game and the ongoing comic activity be added to the forum charter and that puzzle time and the poetry competition be crossed out?

An entry! Thank you so much for saving my face! It wasn't showing up for me at first though, so here's a link for everyone with the same problem: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v74/TheYak/death.png

Very nice!

I was really afraid that nobody would enter (or post) at all (besides Ali's non-entry that is) and already prepared myself for that eventuality by making:



Luckily, I don't need to use it now. We have a deserving winner. Congratulations to TheYak who will host the next competition. I'm looking forward to it.

I know that this comic contest was a bit shorter than usual due to my late starting of it. Again, I'm sorry. I hope nobody had to drop out due to the time constraints.

Well, maybe somebody should start a thread in General Discussion then. It should probably a general adventure-related trivia quiz, not limited to names. On the other hand, there are almost too many competitions already.

Well, we wouldn't want to intimidate the aliens, would we? See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque

[Last Crusade]

Woohoo! I won without realising that it was supposed to be a competition. 8)

I wouldn't mind hosting one of these, but somehow I doubt that there'd be interest in a regular feature like this. What do you think?

Sophia only appeared in one Indiana Jones game. Wasn't Henry Jones Sr. playable in Last Crusade at some point?

As for the picture, here you go:

[Saromost]

Since you've brought it up again, I'd like to seize the opportunity to ask (and maybe discuss) what the appeal, both to casual gamers and (appearantly) also to adventure fans, of all these flash-based point-and-click games, be it Saromost, Hapland or The Crimson Room is, because I don't get it.

Sure, the graphics and audio are beautiful, but the gameplay? To me, it's just hotspot-hunting and trial-and-error. It's not completely random clicking, but close enough. None of them ever captured my attention long enough to play with them much longer than getting past the first screen, because it seemed so tendious to me, that not even the visual design and the story could save it.

But it seems that I'm a minority, so I'd like to hear just what I'm missing (and maybe what that might tell us about casual players, who seem to like those games as well, but never played any of the IMHO better designed and executed graphical adventure games). Is it all because it's over quickly and it runs in a browser window?

Anym: haha, don't take this so personally

Uh, I didn't, did I?

Okay this is kinda a weird challenge idea. But the idea is to make it more long term, like two months or so.

No offence, but as much as I like seeing amazing artwork, I'd rather have people work on games than to spend two months on a long-term challenge. Even if it's only once a year, it's still two whole fucking months!

Also, how is more time going to benefit, say, a sprite jam? The "champions" you named usually don't need the whole week alotted for a sprite jam to present something amazing. Would extending the timespan improve the quality further? I doubt it. And changing the challenge, for example asking for much larger sprites would probably both be less educational for the audience and a turn-off for some of the artists.

The idea is to invite the best background artists and best sprite artists and then have them challenge sort of in a champion of champions challenge. Have AGS's best bg artists go up against eachother in a specific challenge.

I don't think this is necessary at all. If the topic is interesting enough, you already have the best artists compete against each other (along with everyone else) in the "normal" competitions. On the other hand, if the topic isn't interesting, why should the artists bother joining the champion of champions challenge.

[Full Throttle]

I don't think she had a name at all.

As for names, I don't think they can help the story, but they can certainly help the atmosphere. The name of Guybrush Threepwood at the very beginning of his game already sets the right mood. Similarly, I found it very appropriate that Ben and Maureen didn't exchange last names in Full Throttle. And of course names of aliens should both be alien enough (not too human) and not completely illogical (no random gibberish).

Man, my memory isn't what it used to be...

From Zak McKracken... (1) the phone company. (2) the coeds. (3) the evil aliens.

Spoiler

(1) TPC - The Phone Company.

[close]

From LOOM... (1) the protagonist. (2) the guildmaster of the glassblowers. (3) the young blacksmith.

Spoiler

(1) Bobbin Threadbare, I look just like him BTW. (3) Rusty, not sure about last name.

[close]

From Monkey Island... (1) the sword master. (2) the sheriff of Melee town. (3) the cartographer of Scabb.

Spoiler

(1) Carla, no last name. (2) Fester Shinetop. (3) Wally, not sure about last name.

[close]

From Indiana Jones... (1) the protagonist. (2) the nazi professor. (3) the last king of Atlantis.

Spoiler

(1) In order not to state the overly obvious, I'll go for Dr. Henry Jones, Jr. (2) Hans Ãœbermann. (3) Nur-Ab-Sal.

[close]

From Larry... (1) the girl at the elevator. (2) the evil professor. (3) your divorce lawyer.

Spoiler

(2) I think he was just a doctor, Dr. Nonookii, no first name, not sure about spelling.

[close]

And if it wasn't obscure enough yet, a few bonus questions... (1) the bad guys from Future Wars. (2) Hugo's girlfriend. (3) the blue gobliin. (4) the prophetic pig. And (5) the priestess that gets turned to stone.

Spoiler

(3) Fingus, or maybe Winklenor sure who's who. (4) I haven't played the game, but in the movie it was Henwen, not sure about spelling. (5) Brynn, although there might have been others.

[close]

I'm definitely not going to see the movie. I avoided reading Dan Brown's books for a while, because most things (music, movies, books, games, whatever) that reach such a ridiculous level of popularity tend to be quite poor (in my experience at least). Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that something is bad, because it's popular or because it's mainstream, just that there are limits to popularity that can be achieved by quality and anything that goes beyond those limits usually didn't deserve to.

Anyway, travelling I ran out of reading material and the bookshop at the train station didn't have anything else that seemed interesting (or that I hadn't read already), so I decided to buy Angels & Demons (a predcessor to The Da Vinci Code that only became popular after the success of its sequel) and I liked it. It wasn't a great book, maybe not even a good book, but a good enough book. It had bad research and slight predictability, but was unexacting and mildly suspenseful, well-suited for a long train ride.

So, at the next train station book store I also bought The Da Vinci Code thinking that if one of Brown's not as popular books was good enough, maybe his ridiculously popular book would actually be quite good. I started reading it and the style was recognizable soon enough. Unexacting, bad research, you name it. However, after about a quarter of the book I got a nagging suspicion and after about a third I was sure: THE BOOK WAS EXACTLY THE SAME AS ITS PREDECESSOR! Same story, different city. After half of the book I could already guess correctly how it was going to end and what all the "suprising" plot twists and revelations would be. I was really angry that it wasn't just a ridiculously successful mediocre book, but actually a ridiculously successful book that was just a copy of another mediocre book. I felt ripped off and insulted. And I still do. I certainly won't spend any more money on any books by Dan Brown nor on any movie based upon them.

As for the controversy, I don't get it. If Christianity is about the word becoming flesh and God living as a man among men, what's the problem with him doing the things human's do? Does that in any way invalidate with words, his actions or his suffering? I'm not saying that Jesus was married or that he wasn't, just that I think it doesn't matter either way.

OK.

[Basic rules:]

Basic rules: (I didn't find any, so I tried to figure them out by myself, so feel free to correct me)

• A theme for the competition will be given by the host (that would be me in this case)
• Participants are required to create a comic (sequential art, i.e. at least two panels, otherwise it's a cartoon, not a comic) adhering to that theme
• Participants are free to use any techinique for creating that comic
• Each competition will last half a month
• The host of each competition will decide on the winner who will also host the next competition

______________________________________________________________________

That being said, the theme for this competition is a quote by Robert Oppenheimer:

"Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

Itself a quote (or at least a loose translation of chapter 11, verse 32) of the Bhagavad Gita. Feel free to interpret it in whatever way you see fit. Appearances of Mr. Oppenheimer, Lord Krishna, Avatar of Vishnu or Galactus are encouraged but by no means required.

The competition shall last until Jyaistha 10, 1928 (which is to say the May 31, 2006). Sorry for not starting it earlier!

Good luck!

Cool! I'm gone for two weeks and come back only to find out that I won something (and that I'm already late for starting the follow-up competiton, gotta think of something real quick now).

EDIT: Or do I? I just noticed that the Comic Competiton isn't in the Forum charter and there were no guidelines specified in Krysis' post.

Probably. Define what you mean by "remade".

In addition to the lyrics and the actual performance, the notes of a song are obviously copyrighted as well. So, if you create a MIDI from sheet music (starting from zero) and distribute it, that would be copyright infringement (if the sheet music isn't old enought to have entered the public domain already). If you remake a song by ear or from memory, it depends. If it ends up different enough to count as an artistic work in its own right or if it you use it in a way that could be considered fair use ("for purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, research,..."), it could be legal, otherwise it's copyright infringement just the same.

Crediting other people for their work is common courtesy, but just giving someone credit isn't enough to use copyrighted material.

I'm not sure if I understand the topic correctly. To me, a werewolf is a person that changes into a (normal) wolf from time to time. So, unless I draw the sprite during the actual shape-shifting (something that should probably done with animation rather than a static sprite), it would simply look like an ordinary human or an ordinary animal. Or are we supposed to draw anthropomorphic animals? And if that is the case, is there a distincition between "werecreatures" and "furries" I should be aware of?