Adventure Game Development - Chitchat

I found those two interesting Videos and liked to share them with you!

Great!!! . Thanks so much Marvel

old but Gold  

Here's another article:

The seven sind of adventure games:

http://www.theastronauts.com/2014/04/seven-deadly-sins-adven...

Bleh! is about all I can say to that!

Yes pixel hunting is a bastard (especially in high resolution games). Yes having to point & click 100's of generic scene objects gets boring fast. Yes having multiple interaction commands (especially retro text commands) is knackering & yes item combination is a horrible chore, but whatever.

I agree 100% that writing of Moebius game is awful. I played 5 minutes of it & uninstalled it for multiple reasons (writing, dialog, voice acting, graphics & the horrible clunky controls - if I remember correctly).

I don't believe the point & click genre ever really died. It just went quiet & fell under the radar for a wee bit. Hidden Object games (hogs) are super popular & have been for years. They are basically piss poor point & click games with nice artwork & zero story-line - for the most part, but they are point & click games all the same.

I'm a bit confused on his idea of what would make a good point & click adventure game. Did anyone else manage to read his mind, because for me point & click adventure games have always been about pointing & clicking things. Item combination, pixel hunting & examing & trying to take everything that isn't nailed down just comes par with the course. The only thing in my mind that really works is the story-line & the dialog. Good voice acting helps too as does nice artwork.

My biggest complain about point & click adventure games is that there's rarely any hussle & bussle in any of the locations / scenes. There's always only the people & things that you can interact with. Take Broken Sword 5 (baphomets fluch) for example. Broken Sword 1 & 2 had plenty of scenes with multiple characters in them & not all of them could be interacted with (port in bs2, or market place in syria in bs1). Whereas in Broken Sword 5 you only see people you can interact with - the streets in Paris are all empty, the cable car station empty, the massive location outside of that also empty, the ruin thing empty. The inner courtyard bit with the lonely stall vendor outside of the insurance building empty. Need I go on? They could have breathed more life into the game by adding some people for example looking into shop windows, birds flying around, cars, buses, bikes whatever driving around in the background or people walking across intersections or something. Just something to liven the bloody thing up.


Now, I liked the Blackwell games. Fun stories, semi-decent voice acting. Nice pixel art graphics, but same typical puzzles as every other point & click game out there though & same control system, so not sure what he was praising exactly.

Anyway, back on point... I think people should just create the games however they want to create them & not stick to any particular guideline. Hey, if pointing & clicking is involved then it's a point & click adventure game in my book - well at least as long as there's a semblance of a story-line in there somewhere...

Wow... the article is quite mean to the genre. Anyways; who doesn't like it, needn't play it.

It's a Scene of a small town with people all around. They don't talk to each other, but If you go and talk to them, they tell you about their problems, because they waited for someone to talk with them.

*lol* I think, mostly all adventure games have people like this...

*lol* I think, mostly all adventure games have people like this...

You're right, but this game idea has an absolute different focus than other games. 

That's what left of the chitchat? Sorry, didn't want to kill that thread

"We'll surely avoid scurvy if we all eat an orange."

Thread killed! Done! Dusted! Blown away!

I think I get where you are coming from with what you wrote, but for me busy means something like Lure of the Temptress or Assassin's Creed games where you have random npc's walking around working, talking, drinking, etc. etc.

One thing you don't see too often in point & click games are characters talking in the background - or at least not in any that I can recall. Most npc remain silent & mostly still until you interact with them. Take Broken Sword 1 with the Irish Bar. Everyone is mostly quiet except the old guy that sneezes, though sometimes the npc talk when you are doing certain actions or multiple npc jump into a conversation you started with a particular npc.

I guess having characters talk in the background would be a major drain on resources though as you would need to make sure you wrote & recorded plenty of dialog for them otherwise you get stuff where you can stand around watching someone talk (like in Battlefield 4, you travel through a briefing room on a ship in one of the missions & there's a captain or whatever he is giving the other people in the room a bunch or orders & going over details - after a couple minutes he just stops & no one gets up to leave or anything & it kind of breaks the immersion a little bit). I think one solution would probably be to use Sims type random mumbling & it would be cost effective.

Other things you could do is have characters interact based on what's going on in their vicinity, like the guards in Fable games if you steal, hit a person or god forbid kick a chicken.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLzCJQiJ7uk

Simon the Sorcerer 2 pulled off an amusing background conversation (from about 7:20 mark) in which some women washing sheets are gabbing & gossiping about their husbands & random people. Seems to go on for a while. I think they used random values to select a primary dialog & the responses from the other women so that they could literally say anything & keep it going. Well, maybe based on that video. I never stuck around long enough back when I played it last (at least 10-15 years ago maybe).

From all game players I know I'm the only one who is interested in the game world first. Playing "Shadow of the Colossus" (PS2 + PS3) I run hours and hours to look into every corner of the world. It's a really big world and it takes days for that. To try everything (and mostly doing a lot of nonsense). Because I imagine that I'm there for myself.

But that's not the usually way to play a game. Others want to have a goal or a target and more riddles (and dialogs!), a "mission". In this Colossus-game you have a mission  too (to kill some huge monsters to save your girl), and if you don't kill you can't finish the game, but the player has all time of the world, there aren't random fights. As gamer you believe to change the fate, to change the story, but you can't. Additional there is one hidden place you can only find after playing the game three times to increase your strength... (it's like an easter egg)

I think, it's a good mixture of targets and sightseeing. That's an advantage of these "quiet" games like "Myst".  There are some games like this (looking around and conquest a world to solve the secret), but it's only for a group of gamers who want this.

OMG, my English flushs into the toilet...

I've yet to finish assrim (skyrim). I originally own it on the Xbox 360. I spent 20+ hours of that after the tutorial bit at the beginning literally just walking randomly around the massive map. I really should have focused on the story quests more as I ended up getting bored & quit the name never to open it again.

I recently bought the legendary edition in a sale with all the dlc for about €5, so I might install that on Steam & give it another go at some point, but following the story this time, but first I've still to finish the 5 million Riddler collectables & challenges in Batman Arkham Knight, before I move onto anything else...

P.S: I've not played Shadow of the Colossus". Heard it was supposed to be pretty good? Though I guess it doesn't matter either way as I know longer have a PS2 - died a few years back & I've already got a backlog on Steam alone of about 300 games & almost 3000 TV show episodes to catch up on.

P.P.S: I'm also interested in exploring too. I already mentioned Skyrim. I did the same thing in Fallout 3 & New Vegas as well - the only difference being is that I managed to finish both of those games unlike Dragons Dogma (surprisingly nice game) that I ended up exploring too much & got trapped in a large open space area full of enemies & monsters that were levels & levels stronger than me & I kept dying while trying to make my way back, so I gave up in the end on that. I do prefer shorter games with more focus on story than exploration mind, though I just finished INFRA which was nothing but exploring.