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Christ, I had a idea and then after 4 hours of work realized it was a bad one. I think this OROW is going to drive me mad!

Might as well try something.
I think once in my life I can finish a project.

[BUT]

BUT you still can start a game with lot's of dialogues!
Let's take another movie as example, because it's easier:

Reservoir Dogs starts with an eight minutes conversation between eight guys you don't really care about. And it's a classic. It's another example of intencity, I mean, it dosn't start with loud music or explosions and all, the intencity is in the dialog itself:

"Let me tell you what Like A Virgin is about. It's all about a girl who digs a guy with a big dick.
The entire song is a metaphor for big dicks."

The second you hear this you're already interested. It's funny, it's bold, and it's unique. Eight minutes of dialogue and it doesn't bore you at all.

But wait, it doesn't mean that if you do the entire scene in AGS it would be as cool as the movie. No. If you do this scene with 8 sprites that move only their single pixel mouth as this speech hoover over them it would be boring as hell. You would have to do an well animated scene, something a lot more dynamic than what usually happens when a character is talking in a adventure game. Put in some voice acting and it's even better.
(And probably 8 minutes is quite long for a game, the player hopes to start playing sometime soon)

So, you can start with a lot of dialogue. BUT IT CAN'T BE BORING. The player really need a reason to read/listen to the dialogue.

And this is a REALLY hard task.

I think ProgZmax, tolworthy and Grim are absolutely right.

Grim, especially made my point very clear about the ags games. That was exactly what I was talking about.

But that's different. I'm talking from a artistic point of view. Things sure have changed, today  the COD kids need at least 2 explosions in the beginning of the game or else they'll really going to say that the game is boring, but that's another discussion.

Games always needed to make a good first impression, it's a form of art, isn't it? The first few minutes matter because they set the tone for the rest of the game. They can be slower, the game can take time before things start happening, but it has to interesting? You know?

I read  that in AM's voice. And it really creeped me out.

And I don't know why but I've always wanted to play a Who Framed Roger Rabit adventure game.

I think I forgot to say something in my post. I guess I'll remember eventually

@CaptainD

Come to think of it, it isn't the best example at all. It's just that It was the first game that has a puzzle in the first scene that came to mind.

And yes, most adventures do have introductory cutscenes, mostly because Adventures try to mimic movies  in some level, more often than other genres.

The slow build is really more suitable for the adventure genre, mostly because it's a very slow paced kind of game, but there are some adventures that can really give you that sense of urgency, like those in Broken Sword, of course you can die in that game, but it's a totally different approach than action games. I would say that deaths in adventure games are more "meaningful" than in action games.

And regarding which AGS games I've played, quite a lot, actually. I've discovered AGS in 2004, I think, and since then I've played several games, the first was Quest for Glory 2/5 (or is it 1/5? Can't remember). Unfortunately I finished quite a few, for several reasons, the King's Quest remake and Tale of Two Kingdoms among them. The last I played through the end was The Marionette.

@Dualnames
Please do.

(Before I go and say anything, I'll recommend a book for all of you: "Making Comics" by Scott McCloud, It's about comics but anyone who tells any kind of story in any medium should read this).
(And beware, this is going to be a long long post).


Last week I finaly finished Half Life 2. Yes, I know, I'm kinda late. But see, I just got, for the first time in my life a video card (and it's a really old one to, a NVidia Mx 4000, if you want to know, I'm a poor gamer. ). All of this time having a pc with a 32mb onboard card was somehow good for me. I have the impression that I've playd every single one good game from 1990 to 2002/2003. Ask me, really, King Quest series? Played them all. Wing Commander? All of them. I played so many games that and I'm not even that big of a geek. But I digress. Half Life two.

All thing considered, it's not so good. Really. It's isn't a very consistent game. You can see as you play it that the game was made just to show off the source engine. But It has a great merit: It grabs your attention and the narrative is incredible and It has a genius pacing. It does. Do I have a point? I'm getting there.

There are, at least I think, two ways to grab the audience attention in the beginning of a movie or game or music or anything:
Slowly building it or suddenly,  with intensity.

The first one is the most 'safe' one. Like in the movies, you have to wait for everyone to get comfortable, open their sodas and SHUT THE @$%# up before the feature really starts, and most of the time just the trailers aren't really enough, so  the movie begins with a panoramic shot of the setting, showing some of the main credits, take The Shining for instance, and then after one or two minutes the camera finally stops on the main action. In the Shining this work also as a way to show how isolated the Hotel is. (should I say that I'm not a big fan of Kubrik?) Silent Hill 2 does the same with the long walk in the forest before you arrive in the city, it's so long you don't feel like going back. Anyway, when you finally start telling your history for real you can thrust whoever is playing/watching that they are at least a little bit engaged.

HL2 uses the second method. You start the game and after a few menus and a loading screen (that gives you the necessary time to get comfortable in your chair Gman's big scary face shows up in the screen telling Gordon to "Rise and shine", and on the background some  loud noise, as if the game was saying LOOK AT ME AND DON'T BLOODY BLINK ONCE, then you are throw in some train heading for a distopic city and the words "Point Insertion" shows up on the screen as you gain the ability to control your character. Genius if you ask me. But I don't mean to suggest that this method is better, it's just that intensity works.

What does this have to do with AGS? It's just that in most ags games I play I don't see that. Some AGS games just start right away with some introductory dialog, or some text explaining something and then the game starts. I mean I just double clicked  in the game Icon and 30 seconds later I already have to solve some puzzle? Think CMI, you have a puzzle in the first scene, sure, but only after about ten minutes of introductory cutscenes credits and all of that caribean music. When the game itself starts too soon the player feel kind of lost, he isn't "inside" the game world already, most likely he doesn't even know what kind of game he's playing. Is it serious? Is it easy? Should I expect a hard puzzle already? Or even: WHAT THE HELL DID THAT CHARACTER JUST SAID I'M SUPPOSED TO DO? Kinda sad, because most of the time this kind of thing happens to me I close the game and say "I'll play it later" and probably never play it again. I'm sure this happened at least once to you.

What I'm trying to say is that you should always try to 'introduce' the player to the game before the game really starts, you know? It's hard, but I think it's essential.

I hope I didn't sound too pompous, and I really really hope that no one give me answers like "Why are you trying to teach us how to make games? You didn't even released a game! Noob."

Anyway, what do you think about the subject? Today I'm in the mood for some forum discussion action, what about you?

Don't even talk about the girlfriend getting jealous.

Sometimes I fear that she'll turn on my computer on the middle of the night and delete all my game files. :o

Am I the only one who gets offended by not being able to run a adventure game due to the system requirements?

Zetsaika:

I understand your point, not everyone will play the way it's meant to be played, but there are certain things that makes the player want to play a certain way, like grabing him with a good story at the beginning of the game and making it harder to play trying every combination possible. Sierra's death scenes avoid this sometimes, don't they? But this brings the question: How to do it? Like in the mirror puzzle, should I put a death scene if the player tries to brake anything besides the mirror? Or should I make puzzles that only work in a certain order that the player would have to think about the 'meaning' of the puzzle to understand the order? What other ways to prevent this kind of situation without making the game frustrating with so many death scenes, or making illogical puzzles that the player can't understand without struggle.
(Am I being too ambitious?)

Domithan:

I'll be sure to tell you about it when it's ready.

And yes, symbolism is hard to work with sometimes, but I think I can use it a little more than I would in another game.
First because when in a dream setting people will know right away that symbolism will be present so they'll be more open to it won't they?
Second: The game is meant to be for 'adults' with some FMV frontal nudity (I SWEAR ) and adult themes explored in a way only Indie games can explore. So the crowd can handle a few things that they're not used to do. You know? The idea is to make a game that David Lynch fans will like, and symbolism is not something they're not used to.

That's the one of the things we're trying to avoid! Making the player think with the developer's head. Also, what I meant with a "unconventional" adventure is that I don't want the player to know what to do as soon as he enters the room. Like "Ok, there's a box there, hand icon on box, closed, I need a key" and he starts looking for the key right away, know what I mean?

I think that this kind of thing is what takes out most off the immersion of any game in any genre. The first game I ever played was Full Throttle and I was amazed. It didn't look like the're was a formula or certain laws that I had to follow, just because it was something new. Of course when I replayed the game it didn't have the same effect.

And in my opinion it's what made Deus Ex what it is. They broke the FPS formula and the game could actually surprise you and surpass your expectatives of a genre, making you think a little bit more while playing and creating that childlike happiness when you go "So... new... IT'S ALL SO NEW".

But god, how afraid I am of being too pretencious trying to do this kinds of things. :b

I was making a game with a friend, it was a horror game about dreams and all of that cliché stuff. Actually we're still making the game, but we decided to start it all again as we tough it was not as good as we wanted it to be.

One of the things in the game that was 'not-so-good' is the puzzle design. The game is meant to step a little bit away of the adventure game formula and the kind of puzzles we wanted to make were 'unconventional' so to speak. How? Well, first I'll have to explain the setting of the game:

We play as a man who is having really bad nightmares (how original), but the game takes place inside his dreams. In the dream there's this entity, something like his subconscious, that tells him this girl need his help in the real life. But first he needs to wake up, and the really evil entity will only let him wake up when he overcomes his weakness and bla-bla-bla.

So there are several things he'll need to do. The first puzzle we made was he overcoming some troubles with his self image, so the entity hinted him with some really evil and scary monologue and then the player had to pay attention to the dream world to understand what it wanted so he could "win" the nightmare. At the end the player had to break a large mirror in a certain room. Obvious, huh? But it was the first puzzle and it was meant to be easy.

But now I have a problem: How to go on with this concept? I don't want to have fetch puzzles nor use-everything-with-everything kinds of puzzles. I wan't the player to think about the psychological aspects of each dream and interpret it so he can solve the puzzles, and I don't want the puzzles to be extremely hard, because I want to make the hard part of the game come from how scary it is. (Think silent hill, the monsters are quite easy to fight and kill, but you're so scared to face then that they look a lot harder).

Sorry about the looong post, but with my lack of english skills I have to write longer texts so I have the confidence I'm being clear.

The art style reminds me of The Adventures of Tintin. Wich is a very good thing since Georges Rémi is well know for his great sence of locality.

Wow
I didn't even noticed. Yeah it's supposed be "awakened". Christ. I'll have to change a lot of graphics.
Thanks a lot, I would never see it myself.

[The development blog:]

The Awakened Body is an horror  adventure set in the mind of Charles Gilbert, a 45 years old doctor. He's having the most disturbing nightmares he ever had in his whole life. And it's your mission to discover what is causing them and who Charles REALLY IS.

Mere item hunting and combining won't help you go any further. To finish the game you'll have to understand what Charles subconscious is trying to tell him, and finally, escape his (and hopefully yours) worst nightmare.




The development blog:
http://awakenbody.files.wordpress.com

And a 'I-made-it-because-I-was-bored' trailar:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmcKSOSfFGA

And if you're wondering: No there will not be monster-shooting in the game.

Story: 90%
Scripting: 40%
Cutscenes:5%
Graphics: 10%
Sound/Music: 50%

No expected release date, but I hope I can do it by the end of 2011/beginning of 2012, but I'll release a demo for the prologue in about two months.