Messages

Wait, I'm confused.

This thread says it's done.  The website says it's not released yet.

What's the deal?  If it's done, release it.

[so]

Oddysseus: Don't confuse thread popularity with topic-of-thread popularity.  A topic could be half popular, half infamous, and the discussion thread will be full of people chiming in on the subject.  That said, you're right, even if you were being ironic.  Sex sells.  Always has.  But how you present it has a huge effect on what audience will react to it.

I totally agree with you about the need for a compelling main character.  My favorite Number Days a Noun game was probably 5 days a Stranger, and I'm almost positive the reason was because Trilby was so utterly Trilby about everything that he did.  Apprentice II featured a very iconic art style that extended to the main character, but his behavior and dialogue seemed a little unexceptional.  I suppose he was sarcastic in his understated little way, and maybe with voices it would have conveyed that more, and maybe Apprentice 1 did a more solid job of introducing the character, (I habven't played Apprentice 1 yet,) and so I guess a more relaxed characterization was to be expected the second time around.  But my absolute favorite Adventure game of all time has got to be Sam & Max.  Because Sam is just so Sam, and Max is so very Max.

An interesting exception to this is the "First Person" adventure games, which might not even have a main character, or if they do, he or she keeps quiet and seldom says anything.  These games try to maximize immersion, and tend to tell the story of a setting, not a character, and mysterious events long-since transpired.  In some ways, this is more honest than a game that tries to relate the adventures of a protagonist, and pass his or her experiences off as the player's.  Newer Flash "escape-the-room" games are usually done in this style, but they can sometimes lead to the impression that there is no story, and none is neccessary, and that escaping the locked room by finding and manipulating common household objects is the sole purpose of the game.  This is not always the case.  If you doubt that First-Person Adventure games can have a compelling story, I highly recommend anything by Mateusz-Skutnik. (Except of course for Submachine 4, which was a deliberate tangent focusing on the puzzle aspect of the series. Submachine 4 is still great fun, mind you, but it doesn't do much from a story perspective, except when considered as a component of the ongoing series.)

Tube: Good points, all.  That's exactly the kind of reality check that I need from time to time.  In a way, it reenforces my own leanings: that I shouldn't bother with a text-parser game unless it adds something to the game that could not exist in any other form.  Something other than the gameplay fundamentals explicitly enforced by the fact that "it's a text-parser game," I mean.  Just because Trilby's Notes was the most popular game in the series, it doesn't mean gamers or even the AGS crowd are dying for parser games.  There are lots of other factors at work, not least of which is the return of a very well-written and iconic protagonist.

Dave: Truer words were never spoken.  Just make the game that you would like to play!  It's common sense, yet how easy it is to forget this!  Even acting as an independant developer, I find that I gravitate towards communities like the AGS community.  That's both a helpful resource, and a potential crutch.  Feedback is essential to any game development project, of course, but design can not begin with feedback.  Eventually, I'm gonna need to create a protagonist, an environment, and a story from scratch.  And while inspiration could come from anywhere, it's not possible to mine it out of a forum thread.

I scrounged up an old copy of Larry 1 the other day, myself.  I told it my age.  Then I was baffled by the fact that all the questions were about celebrities of yester-year.  The questions felt more apropriate for someonequite a bit older than me, heavy with nostalgia... then I realized that the game itself was more than 10 years old. XD  I guess this is why people keep buying Trivial Pursuit.  It seems the sum total of popular knowlege doesn't keep for very long.

So you don't want them to be the main reason people download it, don't put a warning. Just put in some nudity and forget about the exclamation marks and the woohoos about something that no-one cares about.

But if you keep the nudity a secret, uptight people who weren't expecting nudity will play the game with their kids, get shocked, and get on your arse about it.  Maybe even try to sue you!  At least, that's the way it goes in the states.  You're very lucky if you still live in a country where you can just post whatever you want on the internet without worrying about who might download it.

Sorry Ghost.  You're right, I shouldn't generalize.  That was a knee-jerk response to what I was hearing.  I wanted to hear "casual games are video games that are making a profit despite low development costs and experimenting with dynamic new gameplay tropes."  Then someone tells me "casual games are actually just a very narrow subset of video games, so narrow that they comprise a single genre, they're only selling to a very specific type of customer, and the people running the casual games portals aren't interested in anything new or different, or anything that might be confused with a mainstream game."  Kind of a disappointment.  I expressed that disappointment in the form of a hissy fit.  I apologize, and I hope to control my mouth better in the future.

Getting back on track, it seems like players want reasonably logical puzzles, no obscure, tiny, or hidden buttons, incentives to explore, non-linear game flow, and if possible, a text-parser interface.

My own personal preferences lean towards the simplest possible interface, colorful textual content even in the most dead-end of item combinations, a clean, concise interface that makes it perfectly clear what you can and can't do, the best graphics I can produce, and as little wasted content as possible.  (I.E. create an elaborate animation sequence for the climactic final confrontation with the villian, not Use Key In Door.)  And no 20 minute dialogue sequences that segue into an action sequence where you have a split second to react before the bad guy kills you.

Did I miss anything?

Interesting.  I had no idea it was a genre.  I think probably because my first exposure to the term was on a blog about game design, in an article touting the innovation going on in the "casual games market."  He made it sound like a newly-evolving branch of the video game sector; a new market taking creative risks and attracting new customers.  I'm actually kinda disappointed to discover that it actually means "making games for middle-aged women," and knock-off clones, at that.  How annoying.

Wow.  Shit.  I didn't know that "casual games" meant "we censor action games or games written with male players in mind."  I thought "causal" just meant "indie budget games."  Fook Mi.  So much for that route.

More than one reply has pointed out a "false dichotomy" in my original thinking.  This is good.  I need more of that.  I tend to want hard & fast rules or a formula-driven design for Adventure Games, simply because virtually every time I have ever gotten stuck in an adventure game, it was because the next step in whatever puzzle I was working on was an exception to the rule.  You wouldn't expect an RPG fight 2/3 of the way through an FPS, so why would I want a sudden unescapable action sequence in which I have 2 seconds to pick up the screwdriver and jam it into the monster's eye socket, when the closest save I can make is 50 paragraphs of dialogue ago, the screwdriver is 6 pixels by 2 pixels, and the cursor is even invisible until it's time to "do it right now exactly right or die."

So, any twist on the genre I do is probably gonna be formulaic and tightly integrated into the game design.  For example, if I were going to make an adventure game with real-time combat in it, I'd START the game with a boxing match you can safely lose a few times without dying, and then once the player has gotten the hang of combat, he can go and solve puzzles and get into elaborate swordfights with fanged & clawed monsters or whatever.

Six Days a Sacrifice wasn't so bad, because death wasn't "death," it was just a puzzle restart.  And hey, that's fine, too.  You get all the immediacy of a predatory murderer chasing you through the halls, without any of the frustration of losing progress you didn't save or seeing the same stupid Game Over screen and title screen 10 times in a row.  Some action games do this, too.  For example in Serious Sam 2, there's only one spot in the entire game where you need to jump over a pit of spikes.  If you screw up once, it teleports you back up to the ledge you jumped from.  The second time, it just saps a little of your health.  It's a very tricky jump, you see, and the jump key is mostly optional in a FPS like SS2.  So they minimize the penalty for making noobish mistakes involving the game's more esoteric gameplay features. 

Let's call this philosophy, I dunno, "novelty normalization."  The rarer a particular challenge is in a game, the less of a penalty should be associated with failing it, especially the first time it's thrust upon the player.

There was a Halflife 2 mod made at one point, The Ship.  It was basically a multiplayer murder mystery.  Wikipedia's article does a decent job of describing the gameplay.

There were no puzzles involved, but it had tons of "murder mystery" ambiance.  This was because there were hundreds of passengers milling about the ship, and you had no way of knowing which one of them was actually another player with you as their quarry.

The weapons you could use to "kill your quarry" were apparently hard to get ahold of, but I don't think it was a true adventure game.  More of a "search and destroy."  Anyone remember that old NES Spy VS Spy game?  Kinda like that, only multiplayer.

Fascinating.

You know, I'd always heard that Starship Titanic had "the most advanced parser evar" or something, since it was produced years after the genre was largely played-out in a commercial sense.  It was supposed to allow all kinds of unheard-of interactivity, even capable of going off on tangents and getting into conversations with the player.  But when I finally got the game and installed it, it just kept trying to nudge me along its own pre-defined path on rails.  Then it turned out the Suck-U-Bus graphics wouldn't display.  Patches didn't help, so I assumed it was just a graphics driver incompatability or a dammaged disk.  It wasn't living up to the hype, and for all I know there could have been important buttons to click hidden in that black void, so I eventually uninstalled it.

Tell me, what are some of the best text games with the best parsers?  They can be graphical or text-only.  Either way.  Parsers seem very important to you, so I might as well learn about them by studying some of your favorites.

And more directly relevant to the matter at hand, what are some of your favorite AGS games, and why?  I assume you're here because you like Adventure Games, even if they don't have a text parser, or have a mediocre one.

So is the AGS parser "one of the good ones?"  It sounds like what really makes or breaks a text parser game isn't the parser itself, but the words you populate it with and the relationships between those words.  Synonyms, combinations of verbs and objects, and so forth.

For reference, I made it through Trilby's Notes, and I considered it a "pretty good" game as far as text-parser games go.  But I was still mildly annoyed in a few spots where solutions I thought were obvious simply hadn't been considered by the guy who wrote the game.  Do you cosnider that a parser issue?  I think of it as more of a content oversight.  I.E., just to make sure I understand what you're saying, do you think of keywords as content or part of the parser?

I realize that it's possible to make good text-parser games.  Don't worry about that.  In fact, I'm fairly certian (based on anecdotal evidence) that a text-parser adventure game would be more popular than the same game content implemented as a point-&-click.  I'm just not sure at this point if I'd want to do it that way or not.  Frankly, I don't trust myself to adequately predict what the players would attempt.

I do appreciate your opinions, though, and I hope you'll keep sharing them.  I don't learn anything when everyone agrees with me.

Ehhh?  I thought it said "to the west the banister goes down a flight of stairs, following it east goes blah de blah de blah"  I went west.  I figured that meant I was on the second floor of the house now.  It had a greenhouse and a sitting room and everything.  Or so I thought.  Maybe I was reading it wrong.

For that matter, just the fact that the word "attic" was plural threw me.  Was this supposed to be some kinda mansion or something?  Or was every move command the equivilent of a 5-foot step?

Now I'm more ocnfused than ever.  The more I learn, the less I know.  Heh.

None intended, man.

But, I mean, not telling the player up front that leaving the attic means you lose?  Not ending the game after the player loses?  Building dozens of rooms well outside the playable area of the game?  Forget video game theory; this game doesn't even follow the basic precepts of most board games, sports, or indeed fiction.

Maybe I'll read a walkthrough some time in order to understand what's so great about it without the tedium of actually playing it.  Seriously.  It's so unapproachable, I can't immagine anyone ever deliberately playing it unless it was released under circumstances in which it was the only game availible to play, ever, and no one had ever played a computer game before or had any expectations whatsoever.

I actually have played one or two interactive fiction games before, and I've got three words for you.  Obvious Exits Are:

I'll certianly do some digging on the staple text-only games when I find the time.  CCC and all that.  And yes, I can appreciate that discovering the rules of this game can be a game in itself.  I've certianly played some Flash games before that wove a compelling, if visual thread of egnigmatic interactivity and discovery, just by making you wonder what you should click on, then surprising you with the results when you do finally click.  I suppose there's no reason why you can't do that same mysterious thing with text.  But enjoyment of such a game requires a certian mindset, going into it, and I certianly wasn't expecting what I got.

It's basically a video game that plays like performance art.  That's not neccessarily an insult, or a compliment, but it's my sincere first impression.

You weren't just showing me the text side of the coin, you see.  Any well-written text-only game could do that.  Any MUD, MUSH, or MOO, for that matter.  You were actually inadvertantly also showing me the minimalist-usability approach.  The not-even-pretending-to-hold-the-player's-hand approach.  And while I can certianly appreciate the mystique of that approach (Alternate Reality Games are the wave of the future, y'know,) I think it's important to at least let the player know up front what he's getting into.  Otherwise, you end up with confusion like mine.

And I mean, now that I realize the game has a secret agenda of its own, it definitely warrants further consideration.  The real takeaway from Curses! is the philosophical opposite of a simplistic GUI.  It's not just a text game, but a deliberately obtuse text game.  The kind of game that causes 30 or 40 players to discuss the game at lunch or over late-night phone calls.  Because honestly, there's no other way to get through it.

I'm familiar with this concept, it's the driving force behind the newly-emerging field of ARGs.  I just never expected to be handed a single-player video game that used it.  And I certianly wouldn't develop such a game at this day in age, because as soon as The Internet has all the pieces to the puzzle, the complete solution will be availible via Google overnight.  The only reason ARGs manage to build and sustain that kind of communication is because the pieces of the puzzle are released one by one, very gradually, over a period of months.  And as soon as the game is over, it's over, and no newcomers to the game can really get anything new out of it, because the public discourse, speculation, and experimentation has all already been accomplished.

It's an interesting methodology, though, and certianly the antidote to all my previous complaints about Adventure Games not being transparent enough.  I'll definitely try to learn what I can from Curses!, when I have the time.

Thank you.

I started curses, but I couldn't figure out what was going on.  They refused to give you a list of obvious exits to each room, so finding the room directly below the attic room where I lost the key to the attic (which, correct me if I'm wrong, wouldn't that not be such a big deal if I was already IN the attic with an open attic door to begin with?) was already infinitely more difficult than it would be in real life.

When I meandered east a few times, and started to realize how large the house was, I quickly lost interest.  I'm sure it's a great text parser game, but it doesn't even try to meet me half way in terms of presenting the information I need in order to make choices in the game.  If anything, it only made me better appreciate the games that have pictures of each room with big, obvious doors connecting them.  

Sorry, Ghost.

Okay, see, just for the record, this is what I don't like about text parser games.  I had to try 11 commands before it actually recognized one of them, and the thing I was finally allowed to do was the exact opposite of what I WANTED to do:

Before the Building
The building rises before you, a hulking shadow, blocking out the stars above and disfiguring the moon. Windows upon windows pit its smooth obsidian surface, glinting like tiny gasoline-colored eyes. A garrulous display of floodlights spray up from the ground floor like failed fireworks, casting writhing shadows from the dense bushes that ring the building except where the sidewalk splits them asunder. The slate sidewalk continues from the building, between the hedges to end at your feet, eroded smooth.

>exits
[ You've discovered a verb that the game does not recognize. If you're frustrated, look for common verbs in the general IF help menu by tying 'help'. ]

>leave building
You are already outside the building!

>walk away
You do not see that here.

>exit
But you aren't in anything at the moment.

>flee
[ You've discovered a verb that the game does not recognize. If you're frustrated, look for common verbs in the general IF help menu by tying 'help'. ]

>do not enter building
[ You've discovered a verb that the game does not recognize. If you're frustrated, look for common verbs in the general IF help menu by tying 'help'. ]

>enter building
You see no entrance here.

>shoot self
[ You've discovered a verb that the game does not recognize. If you're frustrated, look for common verbs in the general IF help menu by tying 'help'. ]

>inventory
You are carrying nothing.

>look around
I only understood you as far as wanting to look.

>look

Before the Building
The building rises before you, a hulking shadow, blocking out the stars above and disfiguring the moon. Windows upon windows pit its smooth obsidian surface, glinting like tiny gasoline-colored eyes. A garrulous display of floodlights spray up from the ground floor like failed fireworks, casting writhing shadows from the dense bushes that ring the building except where the sidewalk splits them asunder. The slate sidewalk continues from the building, between the hedges to end at your feet, eroded smooth.

>follow sidewalk

South Entrance
Here, the sidewalk ends at double-glass doors, surrounded by hedges. The floodlights crouched near the building wall spew harsh fluorescent light upwards, making the doors nearly translucent. The wind sighs, rustling the hedges, and their shadows flicker in menacing serpent-shaped dances.

The yellowed glass doors are closed.

A sleek, black brick is mounted flush to the wall, blinking red. A narrow indentation bisects it left to right.

You can also see a spiky soft ball here.

>

All I wanted to do was, you know, get away from the building, since every single word of text in the introduction made it clear that entering the building would be pretty much a Bad Thing.  Failing that, I tried to enter the building, and was AGAIN thwarted.  It doesn't even use a nice simple N,S,W,E description so I can't properly visualize the area.  I guess I'm just the wrong type of player for parser games.

Oh.  But I've just realized that I was playing Building, the demo game that comes with not WinFrotz, and not Curses.  I'll be sure and give Curses a go before I dismiss the genre.  I just felt the log of my first steps in Building made a better demonstration of my issue with the genre than anything I could have come up with.

[Ghost:]

Ghost: Well, I'm a newcomer to AGS.   I haven't used it before, I haven't played many adventure games, and I didn't even have the common decency to lurk here for a good while before I started posting.  I may immagine I know a thing or two about video games, but that doesn't mean I'm not a hapless noob when it comes to AGS.

Plus, I'm American, so I figured I'd better preface my first post with a little humility, just to throw you all off the scent.

Radiant:  Yup, I agree with you that if I have 15-20 options, I am obligated to write an interesting response for every verb to every object.  Otherwise they become pointless red-herrings 90% of the time.  Actually, even if I do create interesting responses, "throw shoe at baby" would still be a red herring.  It'd just be an INTERESTING red herring that was rewarding to attempt. 

There is a difference between actual complexity, implied complexity, and precieved complexity.  Adding verbs implies greater complexity, but only verb-object combinations that yeild interesting results will be counted by the player as precieved complexity.  Actual complexity is content, hidden or exposed, that the developer has written and the player can access.

Oh, and by the phrase "verb-cloud," I just meant a pop-up box of 15-30 verbs that the game explicitly tells you can be used to interact with the game world.  So, post-parser, pre-look/use/talk paradigm.

And you have a good point.  Trilby's Notes was the most well-recieved game in the Number Days a Noun series, so it's clear that players still enjoy the parser approach.  I guess it was irresponsible of me to describe it as the simpler interfaces "trumping" the more complex ones.  Then again, the first few people who responded didn't seem to have a problem with my word choice, so I'd immagine there are two camps.

I'll tell you what, I promise you that if I ever do make a game with 3 verbs, I'll use all 3, all over the place.  If I make a verb-cloud game, I'll make it clear which verbs are useful and which ones are filler.  If I make a text parser game, I'll write a meaningful response for every possible combination of actions I can think of.  ("You ponder using the needle-nose pliers on the boarded-up door, but the nails are sunk much too deeply into the sturdy wood.  You'll have to find something stronger.")

I think we can both agree that the more content the better, that content should be revealed bit by bit through exploration, and that each new revelation should logically (if subtly) lead the player towards the next.  The only difference is what counts as "exploration," or which type of exploration is more meaningful: exploring a physical world or trying out different ideas.

My main issue with parsers is that they force the player to manipulate a black box of possible commands.  Actions that seem reasonable to ME might not be in there.  ("Get bottle."  "You can't.  It's behind the counter."  "Jump over counter."  "I don't understand the word 'jump.'"  "Crawl over counter"  "I don't understand the word 'crawl'"  "Climb over counter."  "You have to get closer before you can climb the fire escape."  "So let me get this straight.  I'm supposedly playing as Trilby, master catburgular, and you're telling me I can't even crawl over a bar top to steal a bottle of booze, in a completely empty room devoid of whitnesses, at a hotel where all the staff have already disappeared into an alternate dimmension and been cut into finger sandwiches?"  "I don't understand the word 'logic.'") 

Of course, if I ever do choose to make a parser game, I'll try to anticipate every crackpot plan the player might come up with, but my gut tells me that's just not possible.  So rather than create a game that supposedly offers limitless creativity but in fact just requires the player to guess not only a solution, but the same solution the game designer though of, I'd rather create a game that says "These are your tools.  This is the world.  This is your goal.  Good luck."

Personally, I have the aesthetics of a 14 year-old, and I don't care who knows it.  If I was going to use nudity in my game for tittilation's sake, I'd pack the game with it, put a warning on the game's website and make certian everyone who downloaded the game knew what they were getting into.  Whether it's a comical throwaway gag game like Leisure Suit Larry, or a "serious" sex sim, or a facetious project designed to underscore the fact that sex sells, no matter how bad the game, I would want to make sure that if the nudity's there, people know it's there before they even load the game.  I certianly wouldn't sneak that sort of content into a game.

Now, if "Hey, look-- SEX!" wasn't the objective of the game, then I probably wouldn't use nudity at all, or if I did, I would use non-explicit, tasteful, hinted-at nudity like in 6 Days a Sacrifice.

If the game's not built around tittilation, AND it's not a raunchy comedy full of sex and toilet humor, AND it's not artistic enough to justify artsy-fartsy shaded figures... then it actually sounds kinda boring.  Why would you think adding nudity to the game would save it?

That said, there's no good reason why a regular normal adventure game would HIDE nudity from the player, if the player does something like peep through a hole into the womens' locker room.  But again, that implies a comedic slant.  The content in your game should support the theme of the game, be that theme love or suspense or action or mystery. 

So yeah, I say don't tack on nudity, especially not as an easter egg, but do feel free to use nudity in your game if you think it helps you express your ideas.

If you must do it, though, at least do it right.  Make it deliberately arousing or deliberately disgusting, but don't just throw any old nudity up on the screen and expect riches and fame to follow.  At the very least, you should be trying to elicit some particular response.  And if you make the model, and it doesn't ellicit that intended response, then maybe your game is better off without it.  The Uncanny Valley is a clever foe.  Always be wary.

Well, Ghost, right now I'm still at the "imitation" phase, but I've had some ambitious thoughts on the matter.  (One of them being, "Hmmm, what can I do with 300 characters?")  I have a few novel ideas for loose plots for adventure games.  Presumably I'll pick one of those and start developing it.  I need to dig deeper into the engine before I'll have any solid ideas for game design, because I don't know the limitations of the engine yet.

In Flash, I'd design my own interface, use a one-click system and add pop-up menus (punch the guy, talk to the guy) for special case choices not covered by a simple one-click system.  OR, I might make a find-the-button game deliberately lacking the context to predict what will happen when you find it.  (A'la Myst.  I wouldn't recommend inkjecting this approach into a more traditional game, since it quickly becomes a source of headaches, but if it's clear from the start that the entire world is a mystery and all the choices lead to surprises, then it lends the whole game its own sense of enigma.)

Basically, I figure I've got one or two screens at the start of an AGS game in which to train the player's expectations.  I figure I can't stick something BRAND NEW in after that point, for example, a real-time combat scene 2/3 of the way through the game, because if I do, the player won't be expecting th unexpected by that point.  So, that's one pitfall to avoid.

It seems to me that adventure games are primarily about exploration, decision-making, and storytelling.  I don't consider egnigmatic ways of interacting with the environment to be a meaningful source of gameplay.  I think the controls should always be as simple as possible, because that gives the player the ability to meaningfully affect the game's outcome.  I'm not sure that "challenge" has any meaningful definition in this genre of game, unless you added some reflex-based stuff.  But again, if a mini-game like that exists, better to build a whole special game around it than to tack it onto a standard adventure game.

My previous comments about risk/reward cycles was a comment about games in general, and now that I think about it, it doesn't apply here.  Rather, the risk (if any) is making the wrong choice, or failing to make the right choice in time.  (And it always bugged me when 7 Days a Skeptic would do a long dialogue scene, then give you 2 seconds in which to act before killing you, with no opprotunity to save your game beforehand.  IMHO, that's bad form.)  That said, I absolutely LOVED how in Six Days a Sacrifice, if you died you'd just wake up in bed from the point right before you made that ill-fated decision.  I consider that a brilliant game-over scenario, especially for a horror game.

I plan to spend today tinkering with AGS and trying to discover some of its limits.  I'll let you know more about my plans, intentions, and goals once I better understand the limits and abilities of this system.

If you were asking about the plots, worlds, and protagonists going through my head, well, I'm not prepared to reveal any of them yet.  A little bird told me it's better to surprise everyone with a release than to build anticipation and then cancel a project.

Huh.  I thought Direct3D was "what they called it in the late 90's" and DirectX was "what they call it now."  I didn't know all that.  Thanks for the info.

Edit: Wait, I remember now.  DirectX was the older one.  It meant 2D games in Windows.

Yeah, using Direct3D (or even OpenGL, since all major competing GPUs these days are highly optimized for both graphics languages) in your core engine allows you to draw 2D sprites to the screen as 3D polygons, which means they bennefit from the GPU's hardware acceleration.

Depending on how the chips fall, you might even be able to afford to blow Characters on things like particle effects, after this next update!

Ghost: I am guessing that, unless there's some severe bottleneck in the scripting engine, DirectX support will result in a vast speed-up for games that dare to use large numbers of characters at once... did... did you call it Direct3D?  :o

EldKatt: That's sage advice for any game developer.  Also, I think I was saying Sierra-style in that post, when I actually meant to say LucusArts-Style.  Sorry for any confusion.

[Ghost:]

Wow, thanks for the quick feedback.  

Ghost: How slow are we talking about here?  Adventure games (at least when, IMHO, done right,) are essentially turn-based, so would slowdown even impact the game's performance?  Before I read that FAQ, I was operating from the "everyone owns a pentium" mindset Scotch seems to share.  Now I'm not so sure.

Scotch: I find your claim that hidden details would only work for comedic games something of an intriguing challenge.  I for one could easily immagine some kinda emo game where every object laying around the guy's home has three distinct types of pathos attached to it.  Or for that matter, a Lifetime Network type game where everything you manipulate brings back fond memories.

ProgZmax: I really do want to sell my creations.  That said, I'm confident that virtually any game, regardless of genre, will sell as a casual game, as long as the graphics are decent, the gameplay involves a solid collection of risk/reward schedules, and it's not too short, trite, or amaturish.  If I do that, though, it'll be in Flash or some other all-encompassing, high-end game engine.  I know AGS isn't acommercial game tool, and I'm here anyway because the community just seems so damn cool.

Ali: "Arrrrrrrrrrrr you sure about that?"

Overall: I do realize that hidden puzzles are nifty, it just kinda bugs me having that Eat command on the menu when I know only 2 objects in the game will ever use it.  If one of those eatable objects is something non-obvious... say, a screwdriver, then I am basically dooming my players to getting so bored and frustrated and lost that they start randomly trying to eat things, or (if they're smart,) give up and Google a walkthrough only to find out that some jerk programmer expected you to go around randomly eating things.  On the other hand, if all the eatables are foods, then why not just replace "eat" with "use?"  Further condensing "use" and "look" into a "look-then-use" or a "look-or-use" makes sense to me, but only because I've seen SO MANY games that use default responses for so many objects.  IMHO, if I add a command to the list, I'd damned well better have 400 interesting uses of that command in my game.  Otherwise having it is a waste of the player's time.  Again, Sam & Max was the notable exception that made it all worthwhile.

Glad to hear that most of you... errr, three of you... have a decent computer.  My main thing is, modern games START at 640x480, 32-bit and go up to 1024 and beyond.  Some experts even suggest 800x600, just to be safe!  Modern games avoid slowdown by utilizing the computer's 3D card in the game engine, even when drawing 2D sprites to the screen.  I realize that AGS probabaly doesn't do this, and it would be arrogant of me to assume the folks browsing this forum even have a GPU.

Frankly, if I'd only caught the Adventure Game bug, I'd probabaly do it in Flash.  But it's the AGS bug that I've caught.  Don't ask me why.  It just intrigues me for some reason.

I daresay I can probably produce better artwork than I can writing.  It's that "retro has more friends" thing that bugs me.  I mean, I've seen graphics that I could have sworn were CGA except for the obvious circular gradient over the top of it.  WTF is that!?  My mind boggles.  That's what makes me wonder if I'm not barking up the wrong tree here.  Retro for retro's sake.

You seem pretty supportive, though, so I'll stick around and do my best.