Messages

[Thanks for the quick feedback.]

Let's see if I can chip in my thought process and see what you think I hope I've answered these things clearly.

I think locations and props ought to be a subset of acts, as a shift from location to location is often the main factor in a shift from act to act. Or at a pinch, story. I think it's odd to make dialogues a subset of props, surely they belong to the story or characters?

The idea behind this is that all resources and locations can be defined externally from the story and the purpose of the story and the acts is to bring these unrelated entities together into a linked prose. A good analogy or example might be making a scrap book. You take all your photos and collect all your memorabilia (this would be your characters and locations). You'd then make your scrapbook (or story) by piecing together all your locations and characters.

Don't get me wrong, the characters and stories as well as dialogue are the driving mechanisms behind the story but my thought process was to decouple them slightly. So that someone can work on editing a room or a character which can then be called upon at will.

I'm not sure if you understand what I mean but it's more so that when using the system you don't have to delve in through the story when all you need is to work on a character but at the same time, because the story will use characters and locations, you'll have references in-line to take you to view the characters in the character section etc...

Have my thoughts assuaged you, if not I'm still a bit sceptical about not having a central repository of characters. Remember this may not necessarily reflect the interface i.e. you would still be able to create a character from the puzzle area of an act. But it would still reside in catalogue of characters on a higher level. I'd see it something like Facebook. Add all your friends first (characters). Create a new party event (act, puzzle, story) and choose the friends you want to invite to the party (add to the act).

I think the Audio & Visual (would "Assets" be better) ought to be automatically filled with locations, characters and props as they are created in the game area.

Hehe, this was my other thought. I 'ummed' and 'ahhed' over which way this would work. I didn't know whether or not to keep this separate - thinking fro a team perspective where an artist might not care about anything but uploading pretty pictures and wouldn't want to be bogged down with following links. Similar to above, everything would link together, you'd pull images from your 'asset' library to define a location. But yes, I can agree with you that it makes sense to incorporate into each individual game area.

I also think it's wrong to have sprites and animations split up like that. Partly because it presupposes that the game uses sprites, which doesn't take into account 3D, but also because I think animations (or actions which need to be animated) should be things which can be added to characters. I'm not actually sure what I'd put into a sprites section...

So you could create universal actions like "walking", and give lots of characters a walking action. But you'd also want to be able to add a unique action to individual characters.

The idea of 3D never really crossed my mind to start with. I think perhaps the terminology is wrong. My thought was to have a separate library for all the pretty things to later be incorporated into a game. I think what would be better is to go with your earlier suggestion of having assets added directly to characters etc... however keep a 'team upload area' available should an artist be uploading a background or a frame for something and not know where it should go. They could then create a new to-do list task for the project lead to assign the asset to something.

Is there much of a difference between videos and cutscenes? You could simply tag cutscenes as being in-game or video.

Perhaps this one is more terminology than anything else. The idea of a cutscene was meant to be a written block of story that was non-interactable. The key thing here is written, it would be descriptive such as an intro dialogue or sequence. This could be a video or simply a blocking script of a character moving about the screen in a soliloquy style manour. A video would be a graphical representation of a cutscene similar to a sprite being a graphical representation of a frame of a character. Similarly to what you discussed earlier I'd assume a video would be uploaded to a cutscene as the cutscenes asset.

Thanks for the quick feedback.

Sometime tonight or tomorrow I'll try to upload a reviseddiagram.

[Update]

Update

So, I've been busy thus-far over the weekend. I've written about nine pages (yes, a whole 9). I've done some card-sorting exercises and read through a few design documents - although my main guide will be the Grim Fandango one - purely because of a bias towards Tim Schaefer and LucasArts Games.

Take a look at this proposed structure:

Click to embiggenate

I've also divided the proposed work load into seven key stages. I plan to have each stage taking roughly two weeks worth of work (not necessarily two actual weeks, probably more like a month of actual time). There'll be testing and tweaks all throughout and the ability to change what's happening quite quickly. I'll probably need a few people to start using it and messing around with the system at the end of each stage starting from the end of stage two. With stage three and four I'm hoping to be more widely open to people who want early access to a beta.

Stage One: The Core - end of June
Underlying framework and engine
Database architecture

Stage Two: Simple stuffs creation - end of July
Registration
Create Project
Create Characters
Create Locations
Create Inventory Items
Create Objects

Stage Three: Story - end of August
Story creation
Acts
Puzzles

Stage Four: Teams - end of September
Adding team members
Member roles and permissions
Task lists
Task creation and assignment

Stage Five: Release v0.1 - end of October
Get feedback from users about the UI, functionality, user journeys etc...
Changes, fixes

Stage Six: Files - end of November
Graphics and audio file uploads (I've left this till last as it doesn't really provide much core functionality. It's more of an aesthetic thing. It also uses up a lot of space and bandwidth that I don't want to commit to early in the project and runs a lot of risks such as malicious files being uploaded to the system).

Stage Seven: Release v0.2 - end of December

The dates laid out above are just rough guidelines. I'm sure some will come sooner and some will come later, but that's the joy of an agile-like development. I'll take things as and when they come. But I feel that the schedule is neither ambitious nor generous.

Any thoughts about the architecture? Any thoughts about the schedule?

I'll be there, probably not the whole time though. I'm down in Greenwich so Streatham and Brixton aren't too far. Count me in, but I'll probably stay at home and visit for days and evenings.

And grass in London isn't that rare, there are lots of parks.

As for dates, avoid the Olympics is my only suggestion.

I guess the idea, in the long distant future, would be to have this export to xml which could then be imported to AGS to make your game for you. Or at least bootstrap it to a usable level. But that's a long way off. One step at a time I guess.

[Updates:]

Updates:
- May 13th - Update 1
- May 19th - Update 2
- Jun 16th - Update 3

For those of you with a short attention span here's the skinny
I'm building an online game design document tool. I need your ideas, suggestions and criticisms. Reply below.

For those with five minutes to spare
I've got an idea. An idea I've had for a while that I want to run past all you wonderful adventure game developers. I want to build a tool, a web application to be specific, for designing adventure games. I'm so used to just jotting down notes in Google Docs or Word with no structure, and I was thinking, about six months ago, why not formalise my game development process and procedures into an online tool that not only I can use but the AGS community can benefit from.

What I want this app to be doing
I initially want to build a web app that will allow me to create game projects. These game projects, or stories, will have:
- Characters
  - Characters will have bios, stats, likes, dislikes. Everything you may want to know about them.
- Locations
  - These will be the rooms and places in the game and how they join on to the other rooms.
- Inventory items
- Dialogues
  - I'm planning an interactive tool for creating branch like dialogues probabaly similar to AJA's Dialog Designer
- Puzzles
  - A formalised checklist of tasks and orders for things to be done to complete an objective
- To-do list
  - Create tasks, assign them to people and items to get done
- Polls
  - Vote or get feedback on a particular thought

Benefits
Well, apart from helping me to organise my thoughts and keep track of everything, I'm hoping this will help people and teams come together to design and build better games. It'll be structured, searchable and versioned. It'll also be a great reference point whenever you need a reminder over a character, place or item.

The benefit of it being online means that you can work from anywhere and with any one.

I plan on building story templates that will set out an outline for a story arc into acts, those acts into goals, those goals into puzzles which will involve inventory items, characters and dialogues in various locations.

For those of you who've read this far, an example:

Let's take an example, a really crude, brief example that will require a LOT of imagination for now!

Act 1 - Set sail:

Fade in to docks
Enter Hero from left
HERO: I need to find all the treasures.
HERO: Let's get me a crew!!1

- Goal - Gather a crew
-- Sub-Goal - Find a navigator
--- Task - Convince the navigator to join you
---- Dialogue (recruit navigator)
--- Puzzle - Find a compass
--- Task - Give compass to navigator

Characters:
Hero - Strapping wannabe pirate.
Navigator - The navigator of the Hero's ship. One eye, one leg. Goes by the name skippy.

Inventory Items:
Compass - Found in chest

Dialogues:
Recruit Navigator
HERO - Hey, join my crew
NAVIGATOR - Sure, find me a compass

Puzzles:
Find a compass
Look at chest
Open chest
Take compass

... and your minds are blown!

This is a long way from being completed but I'm really enthsiastic about it. I've got some ideas and have been reading a lot on design documents. I've had a look at the Grim Fandango DD as well as a few other methodologies for game design. I had a look at a few apps for movie script writing and am building up a picture but really need you guys to help plan what you want or think would be useful. I can use this thread to update you guys and collect more info.

For lack of a better name for the tool I'm going with the lazy codename of 'dossier'.

My background in case people are skeptical about my skillz
Well. I'm a professional web-developer. My diet consists of Javascript and a healthy sized portion of HTML, CSS and other web-related curios. My professional career consists of building global brand management systems and online digital libraries. I'm also one of the least organised people I know and need lists for almost everything.

So, my plan is to build this with help from you. Tell me what you want, what you think would be good or bad. What workflow processes you go through to build your game. How you divide up your work to get things done. 

-magintz

2 Weeks ago Jordan Mechner found the original source code for the first PoP game in a box at his dads home. He's recently put all the source code up on GitHub.

Read the full blog article here: http://jordanmechner.com/blog/2012/04/textfiles/
... or go straight to the code: https://github.com/jmechner/Prince-of-Persia-Apple-II

I'm attending a meetup on Thursday on Cross platform HTML5 Games & Javascript Micro Frameworks

This month we have Nick Brown speaking on Cross platform HTML5 Games, and Daniel Knell speaking on Javascript Micro Frameworks!

With many more developers specialising in either HTML5 or Javascript now, it's time we drilled in to best practises in both fields, with lots of examples and case studies for HTML5 work, and a look at the best way to structure your Javascript!

HTML5 Games

More details coming soon...

Javascript Micro Frameworks

In recent years there has been an upwards trend in the use of JavaScript micro frameworks -- small, single purpose libraries -- Daniel's talk gives an introduction into what they are, what they can do for you, and where to get started using them in your own web applications.

http://www.meetup.com/londonweb/events/27064461/

Will let you know what I find out.

Something interested popped up on TechCrunch today and BBC.

The BBC has just invested heavily in a HTML5 gaming engine called SpacePort.io

http://spaceport.io/

[original article] - http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/11/bbc-bets-on-html5-games-invests-millions-in-mobile-game-creation-platform-spaceport-io/

I hope to have a good play around with this, looks great.

GameStation and Game are the same company. It's all shutting down... HMV doesn't look too stable either. Where am I gonna buy my games now? Online? But I wanna play NOW!

I'm a JavaScript developer by profession, so for me I'm a little biased. JS is native to ALL browsers and so is more widely adopted than flash (a third party plugin that is not compatible with the likes of iPhones and iPads).

Flash is slowly becoming a thing of the past, it's much more restrictive.

JS has come a long way over the past few years and all my personal development outside of work is done in NodeJS. I've dabbled with the idea of a JS Game Studio myself and would love to be a part of it if someone plans on  starting the venture.

A flash app would have the benefit (or hinderance) of hiding code. All JS code is viewable in source. Similarly Adobe Air allows you to actually 'install' the app on your desktop and would be good for offline play. However JS only needs a browser to run, not the internet (depending on the services used in game, but that would be the same as Air). JS could use the same code for my phone, laptop, desktop, PSP, Android phone WITHOUT installing anything on any of the devices.

As far as I'm concerned for anyone wanting to get into JS this is the best book out there:
JavaScript: The Good Parts

As for NodeJS it's still very new, and as a result can come with a lot of downfalls. Things change quickly, what was common practice 6 months ago might now be redundant in place of something new. It's starting to become more stable with full support on all the major OS (Linux, Mac and Windows). Lots of good documentation and now plenty of 'secure' support for WebSockets. I can recommend this book, although you'll have to wait for a release:
Smashing NodeJS

I've used the Baldwin Game Design Document Template as well as http://www.e-games.tech.purdue.edu/DesignDoc.asp. I'm actually working on an online game design document builder/collaboration tool at the moment... but it's super secret because I don't have much time to develop it at the moment I'll wait until I have something concrete in place first.

Chicky, any tactical re-ordering of store shelves on your part?

[My ultimate one day walking tour of London]

TRANSIT
This is a great site for transit around London.
http://citymapper.co.uk/

Tells you all the ways you can travel including how much it'll cost and mash it up into a google map.

I stick to the tube mostly, buses after midnight/1am when tubes stop or walk.

Black cabs are ridiculously expensive. If you know where you need to go in advance you can book a mini-cab. They're much cheaper but they may not know where they're going... depends on how niche the location you're going is.

Pick up a mini a-z map, speak to the locals who are on the desk at the hotel/hostel.

STUFF TO DO
Because it always rains, museums are always good. London is always coming in the top lists worldwide for it's parks, museums and galleries, all of which are free. Science museum, natural history museum, Victoria and Albert museum, national gallery. You'll have to pay for special exhibits or for some private galleries.

Go shopping on Oxford Street. see Buckingham Palace or the Tower of London (pay to get in, but still just as good looking from the outside). Go to Harrods in Knightsbridge, check out bars and clubs in Soho or Shoreditch. Ride the London Eye ferris wheel and see the houses of parliament.

------
My ultimate one day walking tour of London (super-cheap as well, see all* major attractions)
if you're only here for a day, I'd just do this. Take a tube to Westminister, see the houses of parliament. Walk up to Buckingham Palace (Birdcage walk) then up and through green park to Harrods at Knightsbridge. Jump on a tube (or stroll through Hyde Park) and go to St Pauls cathedral (amazing cathedral, worth the money to go inside and look... lots of steps so be prepared), walk across the river on the millennium bridge, stop at the Tate gallery if you want some art or carry along the river towards Shakespeares globe, the HMS Belfast, London bridge and tower bridge where you can cross to look at the tower of London. Lots of good places to have dinner around Shoreditch and Spitalfields Market if you want somewhere less touristy than Soho, which also has some great eats.


* may not actually see all major sights

The panic mode seem to be that blue glowing crystal in the bottom right.

Merry Chrisjonesmas.

For me Christmas was always about the new adventure game I'd get
I remember eagerly unwrapping various adventure game classics over my childhood years.

Monkey Island 1, 2, 3 & 4.
BASS
The Dig
Full Throttle
Sam and Max (although that may have been a birthday present)
Discworld 2 (I later bought 1 with my own money after playing and enjoying 2)
Discworld Noir
Toonstruck (again, this may have been a bday present)

This year I received Grey Matter from Mr m0ds Lovegrove.

Wow, definitely the highlight at AdventureX for me. Made me jump several times. I'm really looking forward to you completing this

I seem to recall imbibing much guineas and eating egg and watercress sandwiches made by marks mum 

all went well. There's great to see lots of stuff being done in the adventure community.

Two talks were awesome and made the trip worthwhile.

Yahtzee hasn't changed a bit, thanks for the audio message.

More fun today especially with cj coming. Even better that there are people here who haven't met him.

You're welcome Marky Mark

I just purchased my tickets. I will be there for two days.

I'll be coming along as well. Need to check my calendar as I may only be able to come on the Saturday. I've also posted a link to this on my IGDA (Independent Game Developers Association) forum in the hopes some people can't resist the chance to meet the dreamy Christopher Quentin Jones.

Within 5 minutes it already got a facebook like, so that's some serious s**t. I hope the venue can cope with the rush of ticket sales you're bout to get

Where can I find the 'like' button...

oh here it is