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[Game Design Theory Discussion: Minority characters in adventure games.]

Game Design Theory Discussion: Minority characters in adventure games.

Warning: This article contains storyline spoilers for a number of early-to-mid nineties Sierra games.

First of all, let me apologize for the lateness of this post â€" it hadn't expected to have to come up with something at such short notice. Also, I apologize for the longish post. I tend to ramble on when I find a subject interesting. If it bores you, just skip down to the final passages I'm not very happy with how it turned out. At some other time I might rewrite it into an article or two.

Remember the old watchman raking leaves at the New Orleans cemetery in Gabriel Knight - Sins of the Fathers? You could question him, but he would never give you any important information. In fact you had no reason to interact with him at all, he wasn't even part of a puzzle. Apparently he was just there to add atmosphere. Or could it be that Jane Jensen added him to have ONE black person who wasn't more or less dodgy? Every other black character was either part of the voodoo cult or, as was the case with the shopkeeper, obviously knew more about the murders than they pretended to.

Boyz N the Hood
LucasArt also had several over-the-top ethnic stereotypes in their games â€" the African tribesmen in Zak McKracken and almost everyone in the Monkey Island games â€"  but somehow this seemed easier to accept within the realm of comedy (satire, even), and, I must add, in far away locations like Zaire and the 17th century Caribbean. But the Sierra games of the nineties were often set in modern day urban locations and were full of racial prejudice. In Police Quest 3, your Hispanic detective partner turned out to be crooked; not only stealing drugs from the evidence lockup, but also involved with the satanic cult behind a number of serial killings. In Police Quest 4, the first in the series to be located in LA rather than the fictional Lytton, nearly all the suspects were black, from the gang members in South Central (“This be my ‘hood. I be Raymond Jones da third”) to the rap-star in Beverly Hills. Maybe not so surprising coming from the man who was LAPD police chief during the Rodney King beating and the following riots. (In an even less surprising plot twist, the real killer turns out to be a white man, but not just any white male: a transvestite in the Norman Bates tradition, (cross-)dressed to kill, obviously inspired by the transsexual psychopath in Silence of the Lambs.)
Of course there are other, if not positive, then at least neutral, representations of black people like Captain Hall in PQ2, but for the life of me, I can't remember a single black player character in an adventure game (Maniac Mansion doesn't really count, because it had multiple player characters, and Dave still was the main one). And while a number of Asian player characters (still in games with multiple player characters) have popped up, it has often been in subservient roles â€" the ninja sidekick in Heart of China, and Grace who does the research that Gabriel can't be bothered with.

(It should be noted that while many kids' games such as Mixed-Up Mother Goose allow the player to choose non-white characters, the intention here is for the child to choose an avatar similar to him or herself.)

Visibility
This week's topic was inspired by two things, starting with, something rodekill said in a recent post: ”I actually made Earwig as an experiment. First I wanted to see if anyone would point out the fact that he wasn't a white kid (No one did, and most people I asked later said they didn't even notice).” On the same day I read that thread, I attended the Copenhagen gay pride parade. And while watching all the stereotypes go by â€" the dykes on bikes, leather men, drag queens, and tanned young men dancing suggestively in nothing but their briefs â€" I thought about rodekill's remark. Obviously, the psychotic and ultra-violent Earwig isn't a positive black role model, but at least he was one of the first black player characters. And in the same way, while these “freaks” cemented a number of gay stereotypes, they were at least visible and made it clear that there is a significant gay community, because unlike racial difference, sexual orientation isn't immediately obvious.

“Not that there's anything wrong with that”
The Leisure Suit Larry series was as homophobic as it was sexist, and its representations of gays as stereotypical as its women. In LSL3, Larry's wife Kalalau left him for an “Amazonian Harley-riding former-cannibal lesbian slot-machine repairwoman” (interestingly, the parser actually accepts “dyke” but not the less offensive “lesbian” as a synonym when looking at or talking to Kalalau!). And in LSL6, clicking the zipper cursor (that alone says it all, doesn't it?) on Gary Fairy, the lisping towel attendant led to a classic Sierra-style “death”-screen with Larry and Gary walking off into the sunset, hand in hand.
I suppose that's to be expected from the adolescent mind of Al Lowe, but even the more mature Sierra games are less than friendly in their portrayal of gays. Bruno, the florist who buys Gabe's father's painting in GK1, is a bitchy queen complete with ponytail, pink tank top and mincing walk. Jean, the effeminate concierge in GK3 was rather harmless. Nevertheless, Jane Jensen found it necessary to let Grace remark that she couldn't imagine what Jean did in the evening, and in fact, she'd rather not try. A comment that would seem more fitting for macho Gabriel.
Fags are easy to make visible through stereotype, but lesbians are more difficult. While the least bit of femininity in a man is a sure sign, masculine qualities in women are often seen as spunk. There's a fine line between tomboys and dykes, and while Maureen in Full Throttle belongs to the former, her female biker buddies would be welcome in any gay parade. Maybe for the same reason, gay women are often portrayed in couples. Semi-closeted lesbian couples â€" a mainstay of Agatha Christie-style murder mysteries it seems â€" pop up once in a while, in The Last Express and in GK3, where butch Estelle and Lady Howard, as Gabriel remarks while searching their room, “traded a room with two beds for a room with one.” “Not that there's anything wrong with that!” he adds, echoing the classic Seinfeld line.

Stereotyping
The problem with stereotypes isn't that they are necessarily wrong. As any pride parade shows, these people DO exist, just as there are black criminals in the rough parts of LA. But they also tend to turn members of these groups into types rather than individuals â€" as if being gay or being black defines a person in all other aspects as well. But in the case of homosexuality, they are often the only way to reveal the person's sexual orientation without being very outspoken, like April's sex-obsessed landlord Fiona in TLJ, or the flapper in the bathroom of the speakeasy in The Dagger of Amon Ra (“I have a cramp in my leg. Could ya massage it for me, honey?”).
Stereotype is used as shorthand to convey something that isn't immediately perceivable. In many ways it's these stereotypes that allow us to read characters as gay, without it actually being said. For all we know, Bruno the florist and Jean the concierge could be as straight as Gabe, but we automatically perceive their mannerisms as “gay”. Apparently, gay relationships is a touchy subject in the US - the logic being that homosexuality must somehow involve sex (while straight relationships doesn't?), and that's not something American kids should know about. The fact that you could have same-sex couples in The Sims bumped the rating from suitable for everyone to suitable for teen gamers. And The Longest Journey had difficulty finding a US distributor, in part because of the openly lesbian character.
The only games that really have managed any real kind of homoeroticism have been horror games such as GK2 and Phantasmagoria 2, which already have high ratings for gore. “Nothing is too controversial for Phantasmagoria”, Ken Williams once remarked, and apparently that included homosexuality as well. Although Trevor, Curtis the player character's best friend, was certainly a classic fag, he was also one of the most likeable and least kinky characters in a universe of mental illness and kinky S/M. Curtis own bisexuality was more portrayed in a more disturbing fashion: “As an alien creature, he is neither male nor female, and is attracted to both sexes”, designer Lorelei Shannon says. And when Curtis asks his psychiatrist if his bisexuality might be the result of his mother's forcing him to crossdress as a child, she agrees. It seems designers are more comfortable with well-defined gay characters (around the same time gay-best-friend characters started appearing in almost any romantic comedy) than more fluid sexual identities. Von Glower in GK2 was sexy but also frightening, the classic fluid (in more ways than one) sexuality, often labelled homoeroticism, of the vampire story transposed to another monster: Von Glower is, more or less, Anne Rice's Lestat as a werewolf.

Edit: Not surprisingly the post turned out to be too long, so I cut it in two. The rest follows below

As you might know, I'm currently working on Shadowplay, a mystery game in the Gabriel Knight tradition (in my opinion the series is a genre of it's own, nobody else have even come close, although they've tried). And my target audience, aside from myself, is everyone else who loved the GK games.
This is a market survey of sorts, and I hope it won't be seen as an attempt to find the lowest common denominator. Shadowplay will always be a very personal and distinctive game, based on my own tastes and philosophies. I'm merely trying to tell if I'm on the right track as far as the GK audience goes, and maybe hoping to find some inspiration to improve on the game format.

EDIT: I should probably add that comments on the different technologies of the games aren't very interesting in this context. Shadowplay will be more or less similar to GK1 in interface and style of graphics.

1) Why do you like this series of games? What, in your opinion, sets it apart from other adventure games?

2) Which, if any, of the three games do you prefer? Why? What set it apart from the others?

3) Which, if any, of the three games did you least like? Why?

4) Did you prefer playing as Gabriel or Grace in the last two games? Or maybe you liked it better when it was just Gabe?

5) Which parts of the games did you like/dislike? The conversations, the detective work (finding clues, comparing hairs/scales/fingerprints), museum visits, reading books or database entries, sneaking around where you're not supposed to, action sequences (ending of GK2 and 3, the African tomb in GK1), spying on people? Anything I forgot?

6) What were some of your favorite puzzles/tasks in the games? Why were they special?

7) What did you think of the atmosphere in the three games? Not scary enough, too scary, too silly, not enough humor? What about the violence, gore and sex? Too much, too little?

8) Any favorite characters in the games? Anyone you really hated? Were some characters too stereotypical or did you feel they were well developed? Too many or too few characters in any of the games? Or would you like to see more character interaction, beyond the interviews?

That's about all I can think of for now. If you have any other thoughts one what you would like or absolutely not like to see in a GK style game, feel free to express them. I hope you're up to providing some input - every single word will make Shadowplay a better game.

This is somewhat related to my earlier post about simulating internet searches, but whereas that was more about the tech side of things, this is directly related to gameplay.

The question is this: How do you turn library research into interesting gameplay?

There have been more than a few libraries in adventure games, employing different techniques:

1) The pixel hunt library, a Lucasarts classic. Run the cursor across the "books" on the bookshelf until you find that elusive, two-pixels wide "a book". Often these books have no obvious significance at the time you find them. The "How to fly an airplane" book in Indy 3 is an example, and most recently the mushroom book in Syberia, depending on when you found it.

2) The "topic shelf" library. Used in GK1, GK2 and The Uncertainty Machine. Each shelf has a topic of it's own, say "Geography" or "German history", much like a real library. Whenever you need to research a certain topic and click the hand icon on the right shelf, the player character picks out the right book. Often this turns into a longer puzzle where one book refers to another topic - the Schattenjäger library in GK1 worked like this.

3) The easy way out. Ask the librarian for interesting books and she selects one for you. KQ2VGA used this. Can't think of other games.

4) The MI2 version with a card catalog. I really liked that, but I don't see how it could be done with AGS. Besides, nobody use card catalogs anymore, so it's not very relevant. You could do a computerized version, but it had the same problems as the www search discussed earlier.

Those were the approaches to FINDING books. Now, how could this be used for interesting puzzles? An obvious one is the misplaced/misfiled book - it could be done a bit like the switched coffins in KQ2VGA, but that wouldn't be very logical. I mean, it's not as if books are just interchangeable. An index number mix-up would be more likely, but how could that be turned into a puzzle?

I have a few library puzzles in my game, that I for obvious reasons won't reveal here, but I'm pretty much stumped in coming up with any more. And I'm still not sure how I'll design the actual finding of the books on the shelves. A combination of catalog and topic shelf would be preferable, but I'm not sure quite how to do it yet.

Any ideas?

I've been thinking about this for a long while, and I still haven't come up with a satisfying solution: How can you use the Internet (or rather, a simulation of it) in an adventure game without limiting the player too much?

Of course, I'm thinking here of the mystery/detective genre, which usually consist of interviewing people, reading books and sometimes even visiting museums. But is it realistic in this day and age to not allow the player character to go online?

The Uncertainty Machine allowed you to research the strange statuette on the Internet, by clicking the inventory object on the computer, but that was about it. Pleurghburg allowed you to receive e-mails and to search for addresses if you knew the name of a person, but only if you searched for the right name at the right time. Gabriel Knight 3 had a rather impressive occult database (imagined to be on the computer rather than the web) as well as a little used e-mail function.

The gameplay of mystery games consist of recovering information, but the puzzle nature of adventure games leads to strange strategies of withholding information. As an example, in GK1, how come Gabriel Knight could look up "Drachen" and "Drei" in a dictionary but not "Cabrit sans cor"? Maybe he didn't have a French dictionary on the shelf, but he could have gone to the library or another bookstore, in fact, he could just have asked someone in the street, as many people in New Orleans speak French. Logically, he should have been able to translate the words with ease, but because this is a game, a challenge, it must be made difficult.

The trouble with the Internet is that you can search for almost anything, and probably get a few hundred more or less relevant hits. Puzzle solved within seconds. How can you implement as basic a research tool as the Internet search engine in a game without making it too easy or too limited?

One solution would be to reduce the search topics to dialog options. This would by far be the easiest option (and the one I'm currently using) - If the character can ask people about something, he can also search for it on the Internet. But it's not very satisfying. I think the idea of typing the word you want to search for makes much more of a puzzle, actually finding the right keyword, knowing what you want rather than just clicking through all the options, is much more rewarding to the player. But then he could search for anything, relevant or not!

Anybody else considered this problem?

Ok, so I finally, a year late, I got my hands on Syberia (and playing it, I'm very happy I didn't buy it myself). Aside from all the flaws of the game, which I'm sure have all been discussed at great length in these forums, theres one thing I just don't get: The title.

According to the professor's lecture, Syberia should be an island north of Siberia. But the two words are pronounced the same, and I'm sure these cavemen didn't have a written language. So what's with the "y", and what kind of asshole would give two nearby locations names that sound exactly alike?!?! (my guess: It looked cool on the box)

This isn't really a hint question, because I've already solved the puzzle. I was just hoping that someone could tell me HOW I was supposed to solve it without trial and error:

Spoiler

When you make Oscars legs, how do you know which position the thing on the left is supposed to be in? I'm not sure if it's a material selector (some of the colors look like wood, metal and so on) which WOULD make sense, but when you pick them up, it always says "wooden legs" on the inventory item, and Oscar just tells you that they're incorrect, now what they're supposed to be like (does the model number have anything to do with it? I couldn't see any connection)

[close]

A few days ago I found a copy of Space Quest 2 in the bargain bin of a local supermarket for the equivalent of 1 US$. Naturally I bought it, even though I already have the SQ collection. But now I'm unsure if it's identical to the 1987 original.

I looked it up on MobyGames but couldn't find any info on the packaging, manuals etc.

It comes on two 3.5" DD-floppys, there is one Space Quest 2 manual (black text, white paper, no pictures), one of the generic Sierra manuals and one mail-in card for InterAction Magazine subscriptions. No comic as I've seen mentioned in some places.

The outer sleeve looks like the original (nothing to suggest this should be a budget release nor magazine quotes etc.). The inner box is plain white. Not the yellowish one with the mountain and pine tree photo from early nineties.

Can anyone confirm if this is the original? It's not that I'm a collector or anything (although I DO own a lot of the old Sierra titles), but I'm just curious if it's actually one of the 1987 batch that's survived (on store shelves none-the-less) until now, still wrapped and in a near mint condition box.

I wonder why so few amateur games make use of ambient sounds. It seems that to most of us, sound just means incidental sound effects, when opening a door, firing a gun or breaking a window. The silence in between is covered up with music.
It can't be because of file size. A good quality looping ambient sound can be made at around 100 or 200k, and often they can be used in multiple locations (traffic noise, birds singing etc.). Is it because they get too repetitive (as if midi music doesn't!), or are they too difficult to record?

I got really into ambients while working on maps for first person shooters. They create so much atmosphere when used properly, and help to define the room. Try standing in an empty room, close your eyes and just listen, you'll hear so much more than silence. And that was just an empty room. Imagine a train station, or a park, or a busy office. How come we often just worry about the visuals when sound is so effective?

I'm even considering the possibility of scrapping music altogether (maybe except for a title and end credits tune) and just have ambient sounds in my game, letting the background noise be the score, as David Lynch often does in his films. It'll take some work recording it and mixing it just right, but I'll think it'll be worth it.

As I've already asked you to help me with feedback on a game title (I decided on "Shadowplay"), I might as well ask for your comments on these suggestions for company names. I saw somebody else started a thread like this a week or so ago, and I hope you're still up to it.

Here we go:

1) Toys in the Attic

I really like this phrase, but lots of people have already used it. I got it from The Trial on Pink Floyd's The Wall, but apparently it's also an R.E.M. song as well as an Aerosmith album. Plus tons of other things. I like the creepiness of it, and I love how it suggests that adventure games are the toys of my childhood that I retrieve from the attic by making my own games.

2) Pandemonium Shadowshow

I know it's really Shadow Show, in two words, but I think this looks better. It's a reference to Cooger and Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show in Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes (thinking of it, "Something Wicked" might be a good name as well)

3) Camera Obscura

Not sure that I like this, but it came to me while walking to the train this morning, and I liked the sound. The meaning on the other hand is more, pardon the pun, obscure. It means "The Dark Chamber" and it's a sort of early camera (although it doesn't store the image) that projects an image upside down on a wall or a canvas so an artist could trace the image onto a drawing or painting.

Your comments would be appreciated

Is there any way at all to use italic or bold fonts within a message or dialog line otherwise consisting of a normal font? The reason I'm asking is that a lot of movie titles are mentioned in my game, and I'd like to avoid too many quotation marks.

Is there any kind of standard for screen gamma settings? I find that almost any kind of game is WAY too dark on my screen, even when I've adjusted it with the Adobe Gamma tool which comes with Photoshop (the manual brightness and contrast controls on the screen are set to max).

Often I solve the problem by cranking up the gamma or brightness within those games that allow it, but it makes me wonder how other people see the graphics I make on my computer. I remember that Under a Killing Moon had a nice little feature where it asked you to adjust your screen so a grey silhouette of Tex Murphy was just visible against a black background. That way you knew that you played it exactly like the designers intended. But unless you create something like that in your game, asking the player to adjust his screen after yours, you're pretty much screwed if the images look too dark or too bright.

Is it at all possible to create a database accessible from an AGS game? I'm thinking of something similar to the occult topics database on Sidney in GK3 (which, I think, was coded in some sort of html-like language).

I know that you could easily do it with different room files and creating the text as graphics, but is there any way to create an interface that retrieves data from, say, a text file? Or could you display messages (either global or room) in a certain fashion, as if on a computer screen, for just this one room? (I think the message limit could be a problem)?

Any suggestions?

After reading up on the gnostic gospels, my game will delve much further into real religious practices than I had originally intended (don't worry, no damn templars, I promise). I'm not a religious person myself, so to me, this might as well be something I had made up for the game, but I think historical facts make games so much richer, like the GK series. And it fits perfectly with the original plot.

What do you guys think of using real world religions in games? The only time I can recall it being done, except in the "here's a cross, it will ward off vampires"-fashion, was in GK3 where it was used (or at least pretended to) in quite controversial ways. Of course there's always Odysseus Kent too, but I suppose humorous games are allowed to poke fun at the clergy.

Did anyone find the religious themes of GK3 offensive? Or were anyone turned off by the central position of religion in the game?

I was trying to come up with a last name for my game character this morning, and it made me wonder, how much thought do you put into the names of your characters (player as well as npcs), and do you have any special techniques for choosing the perfect name?

It's easy to forget the importance of names in defining a character, but sometimes these are more memorable than the title of the game itself - sometimes they even ARE the title. I mean, Larry Laffer, Zak McKracken, Roger Wilco, Guybrush Threepwood, Bobbin Threadbare, King Graham, Indiana Jones, what else would you possibly call these characters? Most of these names are of course jokes, puns, something out of a comic book, names you could never look up in a phone book (or maybe you could, but that's a scary thought).

But how about "real" sounding names then? Let's look at them. Even bland names like Sonny Bonds have a certain ring to them that make you associate (cool 80's narcotics-cop a la Sonny Crocket), and Lara Bow, if nothing else, suggest the 1920's by referring to the actress Clara Bow. But for the life of me I couldn't recall the name of our brown-suited hero in PQ4, so I had to look it up: John Carey. Obviously it's bad. Or I would have remembered it. Could it be any more dull? You might as well call him John Smith or Fred Jones. It does nothing. It just... sits there. Ok, so we might read something into it... Carey, caring, that sort of thing, but still, why this name? So apparently, you just can't choose a name at random, it needs... something to set it apart.
But on the other hand, some "cool" names, like Boston Low, Max Payne, Ben Throttle, are just too much. They're supposed to sound real, but they remind me of that Simpsons episode where Homer changes his name to Max Power. It's difficult to take seriously. David Wolf (old espionage game by Dynamix) should probably be on the list too. Gabriel Knight is right on the edge. If it wasn't for the explanation of his past and the logic behind the Ritter-name, I'm not sure I would have bought it. Especially not when put together with the first name of an arch angel.

I'd like to hear your take on this, and maybe some of you could explain the thought process behind the names of your characters. I'm sure there must be some interesting anecdotes.

This is related to the discussion on innovation in the "how much time do YOU spend?"-thread (http://www.agsforums.com/yabb/index.php?board=3;action=display;threadid=6513). But I decided to start a separate topic to avoid straying too much from the original heading.

It's no secret that the genres and plots of many (most?) adventure games are derivative of other media. At first it was just a genre thing (the first Space Quest games are sci-fi parodies, but don't refer as directly to Star Wars and whatnot as the later games refer to Star Trek, Terminator, Blade Runner etc. - but let's keep the parodies out of this, for now, since they HAVE to make intertextual references to BE parodies) but as games got more sophisticated and started to focus on storytelling, especially Sierra began harvesting ideas from popular movies (or the novel they were adapted from):

Phantasmagoria is more or less The Shining set in a creepy old mansion instead of a hotel. The sequel is in parts very similar to Jacob's Ladder. Gabriel Knight - Sins of the Fathers seems to be inspired by Alan Parker's Angel Heart and The Beast Within is Interview with the Vampire with werewolves.

I'm sure there's a reason for this. First and foremost, that sometimes you watch a movie and think: "that would make a great game - imagine actually being the main character in a story like that, experiencing it from within!". Another approach would be to watch a movie which you might or might not like, but certain parts would stick with you, sparking other ideas.

I'm sure that some of these games, if made as movies, would be accused of plagiarism. But in games this is apparently accepted. Making it interactive seems to make enough difference to turn it into something new.

My game-in-progress, Shadowplay, was heavily inspired by Theodor Roszak's novel Flicker as well as Arturo Perez-Reverte's The Club Dumas. They share certain basic elements: The rediscovery of long forgotten director, the hypnotic power of films, strange religious doctrines, and the search for hidden meaning in a number of old films (books in Perez-Reverte's story). The characters, the mystery and the themes are entirely different in the game, but the basic concept and story structure is very similar. It related to Flicker as Phantasmagoria relates to the Shining, you could say.

Do you consider this a problem? After learning that Darren Aronofsky (Pi, Requiem for a Dream) is working on an adaptation of Flicker, I'm even more set on distancing the game from the novel. Not for fear of lawsuits, but to avoid players regarding the game as derivative.

Tell me if you've had similar considerations, and what you think of these "more than coincidental" similirities between games and other mass media products, be it film, tv, books or comics (not too many games inspired by songs, paintings, and sculptures yet )

I was just wondering, when you start planning a game, do you ever write down (or even just think about) your "design philosphy" for that specific game? Or do you just "make it up as you go along"?

What I mean by "design philosphy" spans from basic issues such as "can the player character die?", "will I allow walking deads?" to minor issues such as "do I want the player to repeat an action once he's solved the underlying puzzle" (putting the steps into the holes in the tree in MI2, using the key on the car each time i Pleurghburg). I presume that each of us have some design standards that we've learned from playing other games. I think most people here follow the LucasArt design philosophy in many matters (dying, walking deads, not awarding points). But I'm sure that you must at times come across certain issues that haven't been covered yet, or somehow seem illogical and need revision. But are you conscious about this, and do you ever put it into words, or even writing?

I have a "design philosphy" section in my design document where I put down things that come to mind, either while thinking/writing about my own game, or while playing other games. Some of the points are manifesto-like, others are solutions to minor annoyances from other games. For instance I remember one thing I noted: "You shouldn't have to hunt around for common and inexpensive objects (string, a nail - stuff like that) which the player character could buy in any store. If you need, say, string in another puzzle, let the player have it in her inventory already, maybe from unpacking a parcel." In my experience, creating such limitations often open up for brand new approaches to puzzles and gameplay.

I'd love to hear you approach to design philosphies and what you do to keep it in mind while designing the actual game.

Seeing as most current AGS games use a KQ5-style GUI, I'd like to know what people here think about the "expanded" Sierra GUI used for the first Gabriel Knight game. As some of you might know, I'm writing a game in the GK style/genre, and I've been thinking a lot about interface issues lately.

First of all, the splitting up of the "talk" icon into two: "question" and "talk"/"chat". Was that really necessary? Except for a few people who you could talk to but not question, the "talk" icon seemed to be used for small talk, just some random comments, but in fact, several of the "question" conversations also had this kind of dialog. You could choose "compliment her" when talking to Gabriels grandmonther, and "Insult him" when talking to Mosely. To me the two icons seemed redundant.

Secondly, the splitting up of the "hand" icon into 4(!): Pick up, operate, open, push/move. I liked that "pick up" was a seperate icon. I've really missed that in earlier games. But I'm not so sure about the other three. I mean, the "open" icon - wouldn't that just be the obvious action when "operating" a door? I can't think of a single point in the game where "opening" something didn't perform the exact same action as "operating" it would have. I suppose it would make sense, if you had to remove the batteries from a flashlight instead of turning it on, but that's a bad example, because it's an inventory puzzle. As for the "move" icon, it probable could have it's uses. But is it used often enough? The only kind of puzzles that would need it are those where it isn't obvious that pushing something is the appropriate action to perform (say, finding the hidden passages in The Colonel's Bequest).

And finally, what did you think of the inventory action icons, LOOK, READ and OPEN? "Open" was hardly used at all (a single envelope I think, plus it could be used on books, but so could "read"). "Look" and "read" does make sense within the genre ("look" being the casual glance at the object, "read" being the careful study of written matter). What I'm considering is replacing "read" (for closed books) and "open" with some sort of action icon, which would open the flashlight from the earlier example as well as opening books for reading. Does this make any sense?

As an additional question, how do you feel about operating inventory items by clicking them on the player character? One rather unfortunate example of this is when you click the empty bowl on Graham in KQ1VGA to make him say the magic word - I would never have thought of that if I didn't know the solution from the original version of the game. It's a kind of inventory interaction that shows the flaws of the classic GUI interface. My thoughts on this is that it should only be used when actually applying them to the character (clothes, make-up, hair gel, whatever) and perhaps also when "equipping" an item (such as a flashlight or a gun), but I'm not even sure that's a good idea. All other interaction with inventory objects (that doesn't involve objects or characters in the background) should take place within the inventory screen (or in closeups of items after looking at them).

It'd be interesting to hear other's thoughts on this.

This is a minor issue, but how come the GUI needs to cover part of the background? I know it's the traditional Sierra style, to have the GUI pop op over the upper part of the background screen, but it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to need to draw the background letterboxed to be able to use the LucasArts interface without cutting off the lower part of the background.
I suppose the black areas on letterboxed screens compress very well, but still, it would be nice to just be able to either center the background image (for small rooms such as the back room in the church in GK1) or to align the upper left corner to a certain coordinate.

I'm doing a game with a PQ4 like interface (the GUI is in the lower black area of the letterboxed screen), and currently it means an additional 40 pixels of black at the bottom of all my background images.

Thanks. Sorry if this has been suggested before.

I was wondering if anyone out there can recommend a good flowchart or storyboard program to aid game design.  

My design doc/script for the game is getting huge, and I'm having trouble organizing it. So I'm looking into some way to split up my linear design doc in a way that makes sense. To connect puzzles, characters, objects etc. with locations, but still retain the detailed descriptions (which you can't do with the good old pen and paper technique) and other notes.

Basically what I would like is a program that would allow me to build boxes for each room, link them together and then place characters, objects etc. within them. I considered building the game world in one of those text adventure creators like ADRIFT, but then realized that the compass directions made little sense in a point and click (especially as it uses a map as a central hub).

My current idea is to use Microsoft Frontpage, because it can display a diagram of how each html page is related to the others in the website layout. One page for each room, containing info on the location and any objects/characters there. But it's still not the best solution (you would have to remember which character was where, whenever you had to add anything about that person).

How do you organize your game designs when they get above a certain size?

Maybe this has been discussed before, but I didn't see it in the suggestions list:

Yesterday I was playing around with one of the Scumm game ripping tools, looking at all the MI2 and IFOA sprites, and I noticed how each animation frame was cropped closely around the actual sprite area. And each frame was relative to a set of coordinates instead of being centered or aligned to a corner. That seems SO much easier, not to mention more efficient, than having a huge blank area around each animation frame, in case another frame in the sequence should need that space. In other words, why center the character in the artwork instead of doing it when importing?

If you're familiar with the editart program for Duke3d and the other Build engine games, I think that's an example of a good interface for such a fuction. It also allows you to check animations within the editor, which of course would be necessary for correct positioning.