I'm Going to Make a Game

[Ben X]

I need to do some more "studying" of old (and some new) adventure games. I'm playing through The Last Express, first two monkey island games, as well as Gone Home and Device 6. Any suggestions on other games which I could play through?

 

Gang, it's really embarrassing in these situations when no one recommends "Ben There, Dan That!" and "Time Gentlemen, Please!" and I end up having to do it myself. Step it up, okay? (Especially as they're at an AMAZING LOW PRICE of only 26 pence for BOTH games on Steam right now.)

[Erkki]

A small update - I've realized that I need to do some more "studying" of old (and some new) adventure games. I'm playing through The Last Express, first two monkey island games, as well as Gone Home and Device 6. Any suggestions on other games which I could play through?

 Lure of the Temptress. Loom.

[Joewintergreen]

Grim Fandango

[Ben X]

No no no, you're doing it wrong.

[TheMessiBeast]

Grim Fandango

I've been looking for a way to play this on my Mac considering I hear so much about it on IT, but I still haven't found any solutions! I'm really starting to think I might have to re-install parallels and get it going through Windows. Also, thank you all for the suggestions, I'll be checking them all out as I keep chipping away at my list of winter games.

[tabacco]

I've been looking for a way to play this on my Mac considering I hear so much about it on IT, but I still haven't found any solutions! I'm really starting to think I might have to re-install parallels and get it going through Windows. Also, thank you all for the suggestions, I'll be checking them all out as I keep chipping away at my list of winter games.

 

Good news!

 

http://www.residualvm.org is what you're after. It'll let you load up and play Grim's data files on pretty much any OS you like.

[Ben X]

Good news!

 

http://www.residualvm.org is what you're after. It'll let you load up and play Grim's data files on pretty much any OS you like.

 

As it sometimes causes confusion, I'll point out that you do need to own a copy of Grim in order to get those data files - Residual doesn't provide them, just facilitates them.

 

Other adventure game types you might want play are old Sierra games (I'm not a big expert on these - maybe a Kings Quest or Space Quest), text adventures (Zork is the big one) or newer, more interactive fiction-leaning adventures like The Walking Dead, Longest Journey or Beyond: Two Souls. I haven't played a lot of these games though, so I can't vouch for all of their quality!

[Twig]

The Longest Journey is very much in the vein of older click-'em-ups, FWIW. Complete with obtuse puzzles that make you hate video games. It does boast a much bigger emphasis on HUGE EPIC STORY than most games of its ilk, but I still wouldn't ever group it with The Walking Dead or Beyond: Two Souls.

 

Not to say any of those games aren't (or are!) worth playing... just felt I should emphasize the difference between those games, because they are very different!

[Ben X]

Ah, okay, thanks for clarifying. Yeah, it's more that it's very talky, right?

[Merus]

In terms of Sierra games, one thing you have to keep in mind is that the Sierra designers believed the game was more interesting if players had a wider possibility space - they included deaths and items you could use 'incorrectly' to keep players constantly thinking about parts of the game they thought they'd solved. Most of Sierra's games had ways to put yourself into an unwinnable state, and they advised players to keep several saves to bounce around the game state. Save early, save often.

 

The Quest for Glory series is well worth a look - it's an RPG implemented in an adventure game engine, and has multiple solutions for each puzzle depending on what character class you are. The third game is merely not bad, but 1, 2 and 4 are all great (and tonally quite different - 1 is slightly skewed fantasy, 2 is somewhat goofy Arabian Nights, 3 is a sedate safari, 4 is a tense horror-tinged dark fantasy).

 

Of the King's Quests, 1 is notable for a really terrible puzzle (which the remake improved some). 4 and 6 are probably the best for a modern audience. 3 has an interesting structure in that the entire first third or so of the game is a battle of wits - you have to work out how you're going to defeat an opponent who's willing to kill you if you so much as try and show defiance. The fan KQ2 remake is a much better way of playing that game, 5 has aged somewhat poorly, and 7 is pretty mediocre.

 

Space Quest: because Space Quest was always more interested in comedy than on having longetivity, it's aged fairly well. One of its hallmarks is that when the main character is in a dangerous area, plotwise, it means they're genuinely not safe; all of the games have action sequences, minigames and areas where you need to step lively. I think the remake of 1 and 4 (which you must use DosBox for, as the action sequences depend on clock speed and are therefore unplayable otherwise) are the best. 5 is an extended Star Trek parody, and is good but suffers a little because its range is smaller. 6 is a little unfocused (and some puzzles are flat-out broken) but much better than KQ7, in the same period, was. 3 hasn't aged well (the final third is an extended Microsoft parody, which I know screams comedy gold to you), and 2 has some dirty tricks like items from the first area that are important towards the end, and mazes you have to carefully walk through.

 

Police Quest has always been a fussy series - that's part of its charm, in that the solutions to the puzzles are actual police procedures. These days, it feels a little dodgy because it was written during the heights of the War on Drugs and the small-town cop who's on the frontlines of the War on Drugs feels more like propaganda than it used to.

[Erkki]

BTW Why I recommendeded

 

1) Lure of the Temptress -- it has some NPC systems and basic AI, which is interesting compared to most adventure games. I don't remember how well it worked in practice, but might be interesting to learn something from.

 

2) Loom -- it had an unconventional interface for interacting with stuff.

[Twig]

Ah, okay, thanks for clarifying. Yeah, it's more that it's very talky, right?

Yeah it definitely suffers (ymmv) from a large amount of expositional dialogue. Gotta get that backstory out somehow!!!

[Berzee]

I would also recommend Goblins Quest 3 (that's a link to Goblins 1, 2 and 3 on GOG -- I don't know if the first two are any good; I played #1 but got stumped somewhere around the first screen ). I'm not sure if Goblins Quest 3 is widely well-regarded but when I played as a youth I thought it was pretty phenomenal. It's perhaps most noteworthy as an example of how to keep an adventure game feeling "fresh" from beginning to end. It's good at giving you imaginative and varied scenes to make the game feel different even when the mechanics aren't changing (for instance, one screen you must solve is a giant's face). It will also occasionally grant you new powers or put you in the shoes of a different character, which tends to reveal a whole new perspective (and new puzzles) on some old familiar scene. Also it is cheery and looks quite nice, and all the voices sound like "bow bik boo bik bow, boo".

 

(Disclaimer, I haven't played it in years, all of these thoughts and memories are possibly heavily rose-tinted =).

 

Re: programming, when first starting out there are sure to be lots of times where you look back at something you wrote a few hours ago and think, "What a fool I was in those days!" An encouraging indicator of progress and as long as you don't spend too much time reworking things and obsessing with perfection, it's nice to be able to apply all that newfound knowledge (either by fixing up shaky foundations, or starting with a clean slate and tryings things differently on the next project).

[Noyb]

Gobliiins 1 has a great sense of physical comedy and teamwork, but combining unexpected pratfalls and trial-and-error puzzles with limited health leads to a very frustrating experience.

 

Best of luck with the game!

[syntheticgerbil]

Goblins 3 is fucking great. That is some pure adventure game fun. The rest of the series (except maybe some of 2) is solid as well, but I haven't played the newer 4, which I think is just a remake of the first one (?).

 

I'd completely avoid Longest Journey, it's just a huge fucking waste of time for so many reasons, such overrated shit. I'd also avoid King's Quest games, because anything before VI is basically unplayable because of so many flawed design trappings. The characters and story are paper thin and there's nothing there but "history" which you can get the gist of with a wiki page and Youtube videos without subjecting yourself to it. An overwhelming percentage of beloved Sierra games are just bad games. If it's not terrible design, then it's terrible voice acting, art, and writing.That said, I'm partial to a few Quest for Glory games, the Gabriel Knight series, Leisure Suit Larry, and Space Quest. Even then, I'd hesitate recommending most of those games to anyone who has not already spent some time figuring out bad Sierra design, as only a handful of games from all of those series are not filled with traps and dead ends. They started to get much better after following the LucasArts adventure design philosophy set forth by Secret of Monkey Island, but starting on the games with the more streamlined interface and lack of dead ends usually means jumping in the middle of a series that already ran multiple games in the 80s and early 90s.

 

Gabriel Knight is usually a good starting point I think because it's a fresh series with higher production values, but it kind of gets weird because if you want to continue the series you have to subject yourself to an extremely dated FMV style adventure game (even though it is one of the best) and then a sprawling epic with godawful 3D graphics and tons of iffy voice acting.

[tabacco]

Still mad the 4th Goblins game wasn't called 'Goblns'

[syntheticgerbil]

I wonder how you'd name fifth game following that...

 

Gobl(-i)ns?

[Twig]

such overrated shit

YOU SHUT YOUR MOUTH

 

oh wait you're right

 

but i still love it so

 

YOU SHUT YOUR GADDAMN MOUTH RIGHT THIS INSTANT OR MY GOD I'LL

 

Still mad the 4th Goblins game wasn't called 'Goblns'

 

Still mad the 4th Goblins game EXISTS. Eurgh it is gross to look at. (I have no idea how it holds up gameplay wise.)

[Ben X]

The question is whether Messi wants to study adventures for historical value, regardless of quality.

[Merus]

They started to get much better after following the LucasArts adventure design philosophy set forth by Secret of Monkey Island, but starting on the games with the more streamlined interface and lack of dead ends usually means jumping in the middle of a series that already ran multiple games in the 80s and early 90s.

 

See, I think that's the problem: the adventure design philosophy put forward by Monkey Island forces the format of the game to allow you to do clearly idiotic actions with no consequences. There's a reason why LucasArts adventures are all broad comedies or have extremely constrained interaction like The Dig - because if there's no such thing as a wrong choice then there's no reason to try to avoid it.

 

It's certainly more foolproof, but I think most of the problem with Sierra's output is poor playtesting. KQ7 revived you from death right back where you were, but it had a completely ridiculous pixel-hunt puzzle that to my mind is the second-worst puzzle in the series outside of the original Rumplestiltzkin puzzle.

 

If you're going to make an adventure game in 2013/2014, you need to understand the problems with LucasArts' output just as much, if not more, than Sierra's output, and that's hard to do if only one style of game is the 'right' one.

[feelthedarkness]

I would recommend Ben There, Dan That for sure! Fun and funny game, and if you're messing with AGS, it's a neat example of having a second character follow the main one.  

[Joewintergreen]

I was a fan of a couple of the adventure games that Yahtzee dude did prior to Zero Punctuation. Main one I remember was called 5 Days A Stranger.

[Erkki]

Yeah, 5 Days was brilliant!

[TheMessiBeast]

The question is whether Messi wants to study adventures for historical value, regardless of quality.

That's really interesting. I recently got the vita walking dead bundle (which is slowing down any game-making progress I was hoping to make these days) and played through the first episode and realized that telltale does almost everything I was hoping to implement in my own game as well (meaningful dialogue, puzzles and interacting with the environment, good writing) . It was a little depressing, especially because all those mechanics are used extremely well and now I'm feeling like my game will just be an inferior copy of telltale's work. 

 

However about studying adventure games, I think in order to properly make a game which is enjoyable I need to really understand how puzzles are constructed. See how games point you towards what you need to do, how much they guide you, and in what ways that aren't too obvious. Because of this, I guess that studying a broad range probably would give me the best understanding. However considering how much stuff I have to play which is of high quality, I feel like I'll never even be able to truly scratch the surface of adventure games and their history (regardless of quality).

[shammack]

However about studying adventure games, I think in order to properly make a game which is enjoyable I need to really understand how puzzles are constructed. See how games point you towards what you need to do, how much they guide you, and in what ways that aren't too obvious.

 

I don't think you should worry too much about that stuff before you've even tried making anything, or you'll never get around to making the game. Also, nobody really knows the answers to those things. For every person who thinks a certain puzzle is just right, there's somebody else who thinks it's too easy and somebody else who thinks it's too hard. That's why you should build something rough and have people play it as early as possible, and then make adjustments as needed based on observing them.

 

You mentioned The Walking Dead as an example of what you want to do, but the puzzles in that barely qualify as puzzles. There's hardly ever anything more complicated than checking to see whether you've got a certain item in your inventory, and when there is, those are always the moments where people are like "why is this clunky adventure game puzzle holding up the progression of the story?" I don't think you can really get away with obtuse puzzles like the adventure games of yore these days (at least not in a story-driven game). If somebody's playing through the game because they're eager to see what happens next, they don't want to spend hours stuck on a puzzle; they'll just either give up and stop playing (which is disastrous) or google the solution (which is OK but not very satisfying for the player). So the puzzles have to be so easy that there's virtually no risk of anybody getting stuck on them, but they're just sort of there to make you feel like you're doing something other than clicking through cutscenes and QTEs.

 

In conclusion, adventure games are weird.