Messages

If you don't like low-res text and mouse movement, don't make a low-res game.

Also, I've said it before, AGS needs to abolish fullscreen mode and just upscale the game image to the user's current screen resolution. Most screens these days are designed to look good at one specific resolution and nothing else.

I would hope not.

Is that like, some Afrikaans joke?

I finally gave in and suffered through the buggy MA health insurance website to get insured, after being uninsured for way too long. I make too much to qualify for MassHealth (hurray?) but the only other options were a lot more expensive than simply eating the yearly tax penalty for not having insurance. I'm young and healthy can afford paying full price for the occasional checkup, right? I even sprained my arm a couple years ago and that was still cheaper than having insurance.

Until earlier this year, when I had an overnight ER visit (thought I was having a pulmonary embolism but it turned out to be a complete false alarm.) The bill was not devastating, but awful enough to make me realize that if I were ever hit by a car or got appendicitis, anything requiring actual surgery, I'd be royally fucked, so, time to suck it up.
It is a frustrating process and for months I was turned off by stuff like open enrollment periods (I literally could not get insurance until a week ago) and activation dates. The insurance I picked doesn't kick in until January 1st. If I were hospitalized before than, what happens? Probably something terrible.

Thankfully MassHealth seems to be a great option for most of my friends. My girlfriend has it and pays very little. One year she made too much and was booted off of it, which is frustrating since freelance incomes can fluctuate wildly. But nonetheless, it's utterly ridiculous to me that other states didn't even have that option before.

[power dynamics]

This isn't about responsibility, it's about ability to consent. So quit with the oversimplified "if A and B are drunk" equations. Examine the realities of culture instead of shrugging hypotheticals.
A huge part of drinking culture is the power dynamics. Much of it is designed around guys helping girls get drunker than they intended. "Girly drinks" are designed to be more alcoholic than they taste. Guys top off girls' drinks so they lose count of their intake. Nobody is thinking "Mwuhahah yesss I'm gonna rape her," while they're doing this, they just think it's normal party behavior. Which it is. And that's the problem.

I wonder if the clothing argument doesn't always stem from misogyny and victim-blaming (though it certainly reinforces those.) I think for some people, it's a delusional way of reassuring themselves that there are simple ways to prevent terrible things from happening. Like the person who finds out someone has cancer, and shrugs and says "Well, they should've worn magnet bracelets." It's easier to accept that there are personal choices one can make to avoid becoming a victim, than to wrap your head around the idea that culture itself needs to change.

In my mind, innocent until proven guilty applies to the court of public opinion. If you aren't willing to abide by that then you should be willing to accept a defamation/libel suit in response.

I don't think Charlie Sheen's ever faced trial for his alleged domestic abuse, but would you rather it be a secret? Would you be okay with a friend of yours dating Charlie Sheen, in light of those unproven accusations?

Re: Puzzle obscurity and difficulty.

Some of the more inane puzzles in adventure games are the result of sort of cargo-cult design, where the developers don't really *get* what makes puzzles fun.

It seems like a no brainer, but you should always be asking yourself "What emotions are this puzzle supposed to inspire? How will it do that?"

An ideal puzzle has only one ultimate function: to give the player that "lightbulb over the head" moment. You want the player to arrive at your solution and feel like they're clever. That is what's satisfying about puzzles in any genre.

These are the ways you DON'T want the player to solve your puzzles:
-Through brute force (trying every object on every hotspot)
-Without thought (the game blatantly spells the puzzles out for them)
-By accident (an overly-simplified interface combined with a lack of inventory-based puzzles can lead to this)
-By walkthrough (your puzzles are too obscure and the player doesn't feel confident that they can solve them themselves)

None of those are satisfying! Of course, nobody can design a game that won't run into these sometimes, but an ideal puzzle leaves the player wondering for just long enough before something dawns on them.

That MI2 puzzle was likely designed with this in mind: The player would get stuck long enough to try interacting with overlooked parts of Largo's room, such as closing the door. As soon as they notice that it stays ajar (with a pointed squeak so it's not too subtle) they'll realize that it's part of the solution.

This may not work on all players, and the difficulty of alt-tabbing over to a walkthrough in 1991 affected game design and play. But classic games are full of carefully balanced guiding cues like that. Modern puzzle games as well-- when you play Portal, you'll probably solve every puzzle in the exact way intended by the designers, yet you'll feel like you came up with the solutions all by yourself. I'm sure there's some psychological word for it.

Are there any games that use realtime FPS movement with traditional adventure game puzzle mechanics? All I can think of are either Myst-likes with static prerendered BGs, or first-person action games with simple/neutered puzzle elements.

OMG! Trapezoid, this control scheme is brilliant! I love it. The scrolling menu alone is pretty damn great but combined with the ability to reassign buttons it's simply amazing. I'm assuming you don't mind it being reimplemented by others?

edit: Also I loved all the random jokes in the demo. I literally LOL'd.

Haha, thanks. Feel free to steal ideas from it. I wish I could share the code, but I'd probably need to rewrite it completely to make it sane-looking.

I don't see the point in freaking out over having to press twice instead of once to do something in an adventure game, even if it's a whooping 100% extra action that needs to be taken. People aren't so lazy it's going to be a dealbreaker. Also, what's wrong about holding the button down to have a menu pop up? This is second nature to people today what with the smartphones and tablets that have saturated our lives.

I'm not a fan of holding down a button. Clicking is decisive, you can get fast at it. CMI-style verb coins involve waiting for the interface. I'd rather click twice.
Clicking and dragging, on the other hand, isn't that bad. Sort of like gestures. I think that would more comfortable on a tablet than a mouse, though.

This might be a good place to share the interface I've made:

http://www.neilcic.com/testgame.zip

It's basically a bunch of crap I've scripted purely for fun over the past year or so. I'm not even working on any specific game. There are definitely bugs, and the code is probably in no way understandable or releasable, sorry.

It uses an onscreen interface. I prefer the bottom-third method, but it could definitely be less obtrusive, semitransparent, etc.
Clicking on the verb icons with either mouse button will assign that verb to the mouse button clicked. The ampersand button assigns the context menu feature.
This way you have quite a few options as to how you want to play. If the player wants "left click use, right click look", they can quickly set it to work that way. Or they can play LucasArts/Sierra-style (click the verb, then the object, "constructing a sentence" style.) OR they can use the popup context menu (which remembers your last chosen verb to minimize scrolling.)

edit: Oops, forgot audio.vox

[meaningful]

To justify the multi-verb interface you must satisfy at least one of the following two conditions on at least one puzzle. Obviously, doing these on many puzzles is preferable.

• At least two of the verbs must have different meaningful responses on a single item.  For example you can "Push" a heavy chest to block a doorway when someone is chasing you, but you can also "Open" the heavy chest to find a useful item inside.
• A verb must be used in an unexpected or non-intuitive situation.  For example, you have to "Talk to" that brick wall because it's actually a magical brick wall that can talk, and figuring that out is part of the puzzle. "Talking to" NPCs or "Interacting with" light switches does not satisfy this condition.

Yes. It's hard to steer away from game design on this topic, because the biggest difference between one-click and multi-verb is the potential for interactivity. One-click tends to become a "click on everything" game. Multi-verb doesn't automatically avoid this problem, either, but if you flesh out the game environment well enough, every action/hotspot combination becomes a Schroedinger's Cat of meaningfulness. You want to encourage the player to think "what if I..." instead of merely clicking everything. Maybe I was getting a little crazy with my suggestion of making an animation for every action, but my point was that having multiple verbs is only preferable when they don't feel extraneous.

I think DOTT is a great example of this. First thing you do in the game is open the clock. In order to discover the secret passage, you have to wonder if the clock is openable. A little specificity helps put you in the game. That game's loaded with objects you need to push and pull and open and close. (And, incidentally, most of the time when you try to push/pull/open/close something, the protagonist actually walks up to it and *touches it* before saying "I can't move it." This simple gesture helps reinforce that there ARE things that can be moved, and that the protagonist won't automatically shoot down all of your ideas.)

[the Sims]

There's a reason open world games are popular. Players enjoy having a high degree of interactivity with the setting. They enjoy manually moving the player. They enjoy having a selection of weapons, the choice of talking to or attacking NPCs, the ability to knock over barrels and smash windows.
Even the Sims uses a two-click context menu, and nobody has trouble with that.

In adventure games, maybe the problem isn't having too many verbs, but the fact that most verbs are useless for most hotspots. The game world is not as interactive as the interface implies.
If the player wants to push a Coke machine, why not have a generic shoving animation, even if it doesn't accomplish anything?
Too often adventure games limit the player's control. At best, the protagonist constantly has to cosign on everything before doing it. At worst, there's not even dialogue saying "I don't want to do that."

I'm not saying you need to program an animation for every possible action, but the game needs to reward actions whether or not they're part of the solution, at least sometimes. The advantage of having multiple-verb interface is that it makes the player think about different ways to interact with the environment, but only if that thinking bears fruit with regularity. Otherwise, the player will give up on thinking that way.


In short: Any player's thought process can match the complexity of the interface, but ONLY if the gameplay itself does as well.

I wonder if you could make an autohotkey launch program which runs the game, detects if there's a "no DirectDraw" error, changes the config file, and tries running the game again.

Edit: Maybe not, since you say the game will run, just with horrible bugs. Hmm.

And AGS's graphics driver issues need to be fixed, badly. When DirectDraw works, it works like a proper low-res game should. It does not do this:

(If HTML5 can display 256 color in your browser, why can't AGS in a window?)

And this pixel-size incongruity:

There MUST be a fix for that. Shouldn't it simply be rendering a 320x200 screen and displaying it at 2x/3x?

This might be off topic, but I think the Sierra interface is a really terrible idea, and it excludes all but the most committed nostalgia-phile. I think Vince Twelve's "Why your Game is Broken" article from a few years ago was the best case against it. Imagine an operating system, he suggested, which required you to 'Listen' to sound files 'Look' at photos and 'Read' documents, rather than just double-clicking on each of them. It would baffle and enrage people.

Imagine an operating system with no context menus.

There are big problems with a single action interface.

A. The player can't have a conversation with Nurse Edna before deciding to shove her down the stairs.

B. The player is robbed of that lightbulb-over-the-head moment. Instead of being rewarded for wondering if they can push Edna, they're merely checking to see what would happen if clicked on her, like they do with every hotspot, and the specifics of the resulting action are unexpected. The feeling of control is diluted.

C. Or, as a developer, you've decided from the start that clicking on a character always results in a conversation. Thinking on those terms, it never even occurs to you to make a more physical and entertaining solution. Edna is now talked into leaving her office. Boring.

I'm not advocating that every game needs the full 9-verb lineup, or that you can't combine Use and Pick Up, etc. But you need to encourage the player to have "Oh, what if I tried..." moments, and a selection of verbs gives them options to try other than "clicking on everything once."

Onscreen (or popup) buttons for Interact and Look and any other verbs you want. If you left click on one of the buttons, it sets your left click to that action. Likewise if you right click.
This way the user can choose which action they want assigned to which button, OR they can play with the more traditional 2-click system (click the verb, then the object.)

I think adventure games benefit from giving the user a set of tools. A too-condensed range of interaction dulls the immersion, for me.

Be careful calling something other than rape a "form of rape". Especially, uh, accusations of rape.