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talking about adventure games strictly:

Some games are really innovative, but also really terrible and unappealing.

also:

some games are really innovative, but also awesome and very appealing.

but:

a lot of games are of a redundant, uninspired design, and very rarely awesome and appealing.

Oh wait, most of these genre labels are made up by marketing spods in the last ten years! I'd better just stick to using only the old terms

I'm ok with new genre names that make a valuable distinction based on the inherent traits of the new gameplay. First Person Shooter is pretty descriptive. It's a game played from the first person, where you shoot stuff. 'Survival Horror' is just a silly term, where for example even Doom could be held within if you found Cyberdeamons sufficiently horrible. We arrive at a stage where if you have a fps game where there's some undead and you have way the hell too few medicits/ammo to make it through all-guns blazing, it's suddenly a 'fps with survival horror undertones'. I mean, ugh!

But I'll give you 'adventure game' really doesn't neatly describe what the games are about at all.

ask eric to take you back to 1995 and google 'doom clone' versus 'first person shooter'.

'survival horror' is just a marketing term for games that copy Resident Evil. Made to appeal to the demographic that needs clones of Resident Evil. Because Resident Evil was a successful franchise (for what reason is beyond me). Inside they're still action-heavy BAD adventure games.

I haven't played many recent AGS games so my estimate might be extremely stupid, but if I'd have to guess, I don't think 98% of the AGS developers would make anything even approaching innovative if they were making commercial big-time games. We've seen the type of games oldschool-adventure-game-fans-that-start-studio make, and they're the opposite of innovation, most of them.

Opinions?

Alone in the Dark AND Resident Evil are adventure games. AitD happens to be good, Resident Evil happens to be stupid. Killing a few enemies along the way does make the game more action-based, but does this make the games any less of the inventory-puzzle-fests they are?

You need to listen again.

Savior Machine I and II are the only records of theirs I consider worthwhile. But extremely so. The Legend series are just not something I care to follow very closely, although I do like Pale Horse and a few other choice tracks.

I liked your second joke more! haha!

Well, of course.

non sequitur is in this case meaning 'a bit random, not following' I think.


I listen to a lot of music. Some of my all-time favourites are Psychotic Waltz, Watchtower, early Anathema, Fates Warning, In The Woods..., Marillion, King Crimson.

Sorry. Not metal. And not good.

Sorry, misread. I have no idea who Pink Punk are.

Petra, this post covers my opinion of Lordi.

The only good thing Pink ever did in her life is hire female bassist of Hammers of Misfortune for touring, pay her amazingly well, so in effect bankrolling Hammers and their second AMAZINGLY BRILLIANT album 'The August Engine'.

I don't think that's an ugly person at all.

Pixel Hunting is just fine if it's the sort of game that continuously rewards close examination of your environment. Pixel Hunting's only cruel when a game is mostly smooth sailing with very visible items and hotspots and just has one or two very tough ones.

My idea would be a hybrid GUI like the one Bernie's using for Hero Theorem. Take away 'USE' pointer from player, retain click-intuition with look-ats and other obvious stuff like walk-at and talk-to, but with parsered verbs for anything more complex.

I get this: Have things that are obvious, work out in the obvious way, and some that do not.  Don't have things that are not obvious work out in not obvious ways! There's nothing I dislike more in adventure games where something is needlessly convulted. Sometimes opening the window should entail, opening the window.

But! place a few situations where something you have to do requires a few more steps to get done than usual automation in pointless click games has us used to. As eric says, he makes an 'use crowbar on door' puzzle a two-parter in a very intuitive way. It's still the obvious thing to do, it just takes more thinking of how to use an actual OBJECT on another OBJECT and not just a symbol of an object on another symbol of an object. Making people think in abstract terms is not always good for gameplay. Stuff is made from parts, with physical properties, you can look under stuff, you can manipulate their shapes perhaps, you can use both ends of the crowbar for different things, it's not just A ON B. This sort of thing is what killed the genre. More direct translation of what the player wants to do exactly (therefore, options), not just a generic USE THIS approach would help.

My solution is usually a parser. If you don't know what you want to do, you can't do anything. You can't pointlessly click everywhere.

Eric, your thoughts are really interesting but I suppose the natural question is, how do you engineer puzzles that feel natural (i.e. not convoluted) which are also challenging.

Hello, this is Eric speaking.

One possible answer is: making puzzles which are relatively straightforward interesting again, by stripping away layers of automation we're used to in pointless clicking games. This is sort of tall-order for AGS games, but do you have a door that's locked? Do you have a crowbar? Show a closeup of the door, actually place the crowbar and try to wedge that open. Just 'click x on y' itself can make the simplest to the most complicated thing boring.

This is all very much to ask. But gameplay makes games. Not clicking through a story.

It is stiff. But I urge you to his this style throughout your game, it lends it an air of originality that you'd lose with traditional-style 1point perspective.

God is more of a 4d-GO player.

I am not that bad. I eat babies, but first I cook them.