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I'm currently watching this with great enjoyment, and thought someone else might be interested to hear Ron's hour-long postmortem on the creation of Maniac Mansion from this year's Game Developer's Conference.

There are post mortems from a bunch of classic games like Elite, Doom, and Prince of Persia. But personally I think the one I'll watch next is Eric Chahi's Another World talk.

Edit: ...and since I rarely find a good occasion to link to it, here's my favorite game design-related lecture of all time, "How I Dumped Electricity and Learned to Love Design", Brenda Brathwaite's immensely inspiring talk on her board game Train from GDC 2010.

Sounds really interesting. I've been studying a lot of Christian mysticism lately, so I'll be curious to see how you end up portraying her visions. I'd recommend looking into other historical figures who had mystical experiences, like Hildegard von Bingen and William Blake and compare their descriptions and illustrations of the transcendental.

I think the idea of a player character doing something by divine inspiration is a wonderful concept to work within. Because it doesn't matter whether you as the player think it's the right thing to do, or you worry about the consequence of their actions - she's on a mission from God and there's no turning back. Dreamweb did something similar (no spoiler warning, it's in the intro) with the main character being ordered in dream to kill seven 'evil' people  in the real world, and as a player you just had to accept and go along with that premise, even if you could never really know that he wasn't just crazy.

Good luck with the project! You're welcome to PM me if you ever need some feedback on your ideas.

Blow is quite clear on what his issues are with adventure games:

Adventure games are still what they used to be. And what the core gameplay actually is, is very different from what the designer intends. The designer wants it to be, “It’s going to be cool puzzle solving. There’s going to be a story and stuff.” But really what’s actually going through the players head in adventure games is, “I don’t know if I should be clicking on this thing” or “I don’t know if this is a puzzle” or “I don’t know if I need an item to solve this that I don’t have yet, or if I’m just not thinking.”

Can't say that I disagree, having played a lot of recent point-n-clickers like The Whispered World, Still Life 2, and even Gray Matter (which was a good game, but still had a lot of design issues getting in the way). There *are* well-designed adventure games that do have a sense of flow and good hinting - the Blackwell trilogy being a very good example - but on the whole the genre still offers plenty of situations where you find yourself walking around for half an hour clicking everything without a clue of what you're even supposed to accomplish before you can proceed. That, to me, spells broken.

Again, it's very easy to label and categorize something that already exists. But declaring "I want to make an adventure game" does not naturally lead to you producing Heavy Rain - if on the other hand you said "let's try to reinvent the adventure genre and forget about its conventions", then Heavy Rain could be the end result. Rules are there to be broken, not followed, so to speak.

I never said we should stop making point-n-click adventures, just that perhaps we shouldn't be so concerned about what's expected from the genre or even think that it's homogeneous enough to be worth keeping "pure". I think it's cool that you're trying out new things, just make the kind of game you would like to play whatever that entails. Looking forward to see what comes out of it

Hehe, I had actually written a bit about how any new idea is a synthesis of what came before, but felt it became a bit too academic.

Being an artist or doing any sort of creative work rarely means not relying on the rules of your craft or your experience. Things do not get created in perfect vacuum.

No, but being an artist also means that you don't let those pre-existing frameworks restrict your creativity. My point wasn't that thrillers and melodramas aren't genres, but rather how arbitrary and fluid all these categories are, and how most of our struggle to "think outside the box" springs from the delusion that there ever was a box in the first place. Of course we work within certain traditions, and this can be useful sometimes - not only does it help us communicate our vision to collaborators and to market the end product to our audience, but it can also be a powerful tool to play with and subvert the audience's expectations. So no, I'm not arguing that genre should be banned, I'm just saying that it's a silly restriction to impose on yourself - and even sillier to expect others to do the same.

On the other hand, there's a huge and very profitable market for so-called "genre fiction" - formulaic romance novels, fantasy, techno thrillers, horror etc. - loved by their readers, derided by the critics. This, to me, is a very good analog for the current state of commercial video games. Because the point isn't that these airport novels are "bad" in any objective way, I'm sure overall they're entertaining, some of them competently written, and in the end the customer was happy enough with his purchase to go buy the next one the author puts out. And he should be, because it was written for him, to fulfill a pre-existing demand.
I'm not making a value statement here, entertainment is an important part of our culture and probably offers a good deal more economic stability for the creator, but as Blow says - quoting Alan Moore - the role of the artist isn't to give the audience what they want but what they need. This may sound lofty and arrogant, but it's also very true.

Note also that the above-mentioned genres aren't in any way "lesser" or aren't viable playing fields for artistic expression - Moorcock, Le Guin, Philip K. Dick etc. offer plenty of evidence to the contrary. But there's a huge, huge difference between picking a genre and then trying to come up with a story that fits within its rules and conventions, instead of starting off with that one idea - a theme, an image, a character, a scene - that you for some reason just need to express and from which everything else just evolves organically if you let it. Unless genre is somehow essential to whatever idea that's possessed you (if it is, that's totally cool of course), then locking yourself to a certain form or even a specific medium seems counterproductive. But probably that's just a matter of temperament

It'll probably be a good while before commercial games stop defining themselves primarily by genre, but it's a nice sign that the GTA games muddled the concept to such a degree that we didn't try to define it as a third-person-shooter-beat-em-up-driving-game-arcade-adventure but instead invented the term "sandbox game". Now of course, just a few years later, we have people complaining that Mafia II doesn't deliver on what they expect such a game to be. Some people will never be satisfied.

Why does it matter so much what Blow thinks? He's doing his own thing and expressing his own opinions, wait and see how The Witness turns out and then perhaps we can start discussing whether it works or not.

Just the fact that we're discussing genre in terms of "pure adventure or watered down genre mix" shows how immature this medium and it's audience are. Genre isn't a real thing, it's a paradigm, something we've made up as a conceptual and linguistic tool to describe and categorize the hugely diverse range of artworks we can produce within our medium. If we were even remotely artistic in our venture as game developers, genre wouldn't even be part of the equation, that would be something left up to the critics to define, after the fact. Much in the same way that no Hollywood screenwriter or director in the 1940's ever set out to make a "film noir", they made detective movies, thrillers, melodramas, and eventually some French guy decided that these were all the same thing.

Edit: Also, not only wasn't the interview the end of it, as Ascovel says. It wasn't the beginning either. I don't know if this was the exact same talk Blow did at the GameCity event the interview refers to, but many of the questions seem to pick up on the more controversial points from his lecture "Video Games and the Human Condition". So watch that for a fuller context: http://edtech.rice.edu/www/?option=com_iwebcastask=webcast&action=details&event=2349

I started a thread about it a while ago, but indeed, it is something to look forward to.

I generally support Telltale because they seem to be the only mainstream adventure developers who give a shit about innovation - some of the game mechanics in Sam & Max season 3 were mindbogglingly refreshing. And they do release quality product, if perhaps lacking a certain je-ne-sais-quoi. Back to the Future didn't really turn out the way I'd wished - the story ideas they pitched in their pre-release survey were way more interesting than the generic cartoon gangster plot that seems to continue in episode 2, but hopefully Telltale have some surprises up their sleeve. The Sam & Max games had some pretty clever time travel and alternate reality puzzles so I hope there'll be some more going back and forth in time in the upcoming episodes.

I can't see myself getting excited about any of these new licenses though. Zombies? That's so last decade. Dinosaurs? Nah, not unless it's a remake of Trespasser. And bloody fucking King's Quest?!?! They seriously *pay* to use a concept that's entirely based around ripping off public domain fairy tales and mythology? Is the title really *that* much of a selling point? At least go with something that has a bit of personality to it, not a franchise where wearing a blue hat is considered a defining character trait.

Dude, speaking from experience here, smoking a joint and drinking coffee is a really unhealthy habit. Not good when your heart starts freaking out and tries to jump out your chest.  Wait for the caffeine boost to go then have the spliff....

Skip the coffee and smoke a nice sativa. You don't need addictive drugs like caffeine to stay energized  .

Hehe, sadly any advice I have to give are lessons I learned the hard way . But lord knows that "Shadowplay: Stick Figure Edition" would solve 99% of the issues that are making me wait for AGS to be open sourced.

Edit: Just to clarify, I should note that the project itself hasn't been put on hold - in fact I've just expanded the team size by 100% (so now there's two of us ). A friend of mine who's a very talented artist has agreed to help me with the various film clips you get to watch in-game, and I'm extremely happy and excited about this collaboration. Knowing her artistic style and the various inspirations we've been discussing I can promise they will be quite unique.

Don't know how far you are with the project, but my advice would be to focus on getting a rough prototype of the game up and running. Doesn't matter that the art assets are placeholders or dialog is sparse. Once it starts actually feeling like a game, something that is playable, has a structure and a flow, then it'll seem much more worthwhile fleshing out and eventually completing.

It's very easy to lose yourself in perfecting individual backgrounds or adding clever details to the interface, but as long as all you have to show for your hard work is a bunch of pretty sprites and a series of finished, but disconnected rooms it's hard to keep motivated. Prototyping with programmer art and placeholder text will also help you see flaws in your design and quite possibly save you from wasting time on content that you'll end up cutting or changing anyway.

Any special reason not to use D3D's own SetGammaRamp method?

Heavenly Creatures (Peter Jackson, 1994)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110005/

Check out Ali's smooth scrolling module. That should do the trick.

In my opinion, simply adding a higher resolution still is only a temporary fix. What I wanted to try to implement when the engine itself goes open source is complete resolution independence. Basically using a virtual resolution for all in-game coordinates and then having the renderer scale the art to whatever screen resolution/aspect ratio the player chooses.

Edit: Ok, Calin said basically the same thing while I was writing

Great album, Vel. Your best one so far (at least for someone like me who's not that into prog ). Some really nice and moody pieces in there. Keep up the good work!

Has no one even thought of Twin Peaks.

I want Twin Peaks - The Adventure Game.

If you own an Xbox 360, do yourself a favor and get Deadly Premonition. It'll blow your mind. Best written player character ever, and a damn fine attempt at emulating everything that made Twin Peaks cool without straight-out copying it.

"I can tell the difference between 'me' and 'the universe around'"

If more people could get over this little misunderstanding we'd be living in a better and happier world.

I have the smallest (A6?) Wacom Bamboo Pen-and-Touch and love it to pieces. The accuracy is enough for my style of art, and the small size is actually a benefit since I never used the full work area of my clunky old A4 tablet. Also makes it easy to transport in my laptop bag - portability is key to any good tool.

Buy extra pen nibs, though. They wear down quickly.

I think i payed upwards of $40 for an original copy of Phantasmagoria 2 (which i regret for the record, M Night Shyamalan would even say "now, thats a fuckin stupid plot twist.") Really if it wasn't for some lovely gory deaths like the stapler bit, the whole thing is beyond awful. Unless you like to see a shit-ton of tits and BDSM than thats your game, if you like intelligent and clever or even remotely enjoyable stories, than your fishing in the wrong lake)

Can't say the game is great, and the otherworld ending with its nonsensical, organic Myst puzzles sucked balls. I think it's a pretty interesting game overall, though, like an interactive Hammer-horror version of "Jacob's Ladder", and I dug the weird computer messages and the bits with the psychiatrist.

My main connection to the game, though, is that I bought it influenced by one of the few precognitive dreams I ever had. Basically I dreamt I went to a specific games shop and found Phantasmagoria 2 - which I'd been wanting to play for ages - at a much reduced price. Next day I go to that very store and find the game, original version, not a budget release, priced at two thirds of the standard price of the other budget games!
Now, is it possible that I'd had visited the shop weeks before, spotted the game and the price tag without consciously registering it? Possibly, cryptamnesia I believe it's called. But nevertheless odd. One night earlier I had had a dream that told me how to fix the LAN network that I'd been struggling to set up all the day before, woke up in the morning, knew exactly what had to be done, and got the network running in five minutes!

Off-topic, I know