Adventure Gaming Alive and Well?
GamaSutra has a fascinating interview with Emily Short, author of the acclaimed adventure game... er, Interactive Fiction, Savoir-Faire, as well as MANY OTHER titles.

What's remarkable is that while the text-adventure may no longer be a (very) commercially viable option (according to the article, Ms. Short did get a commission to write the game, "City of Secrets" by a band), its really just as alive and kicking as ever. Maybe more so.

From a game development point of view, Ms. Short makes a very interesting comment about testing and debugging, and the improvement in practices and discipline as the IF community grows and matures:

"I also make heavier use of automated testing these days. The traditional attitude is that you should get a bunch of beta-testers to hammer on your game until it seems to be in good shape, then release it. You might keep one script around to play through your game and automatically make sure the winning end is reachable and produces a consistent transcript, but that's about all. This is changing -- recent development systems are designed more with debugging in mind, and lately there's more mention in the community of version control and regression testing. We haven't reached a point where there's any real sense of best practice about this kind of thing, but we're making progress on it, and the tools are improving."

Check out the interview here:
Inside Interactive Fiction: Interview With Emily Short

Besides the fact that this interview is appearing on a website geared towards mainstream game development, there's also the little issue of Sam & Max. GamaSutra also has the transcript of a recent podcast with Telltale Games co-founder Dan Conners. According to Conners,

"It's been a huge success for us. The team is happy on every level -- the level of quality of the product, the ability to deliver on the Sam & Max flavor has been great, and we're really happy with the response from the audience. We continue to have people get introduced to Sam & Max on a daily basis. There's always new fans coming over because the games are so accessible.

"GameTap's distribution has introduced us to a whole new level of people who are outside of the game world and might not have heard of Sam & Max before. We even saw a commercial for Sam & Max on The Colbert Report one night, so it's getting good exposure on that level. From a financial standpoint, it's definitely a profitable endeavor for us, and what more can you ask for than that, really?"

Fluke? A new golden age of graphic adventures following in the footsteps of Sam & Max? Something else entirely?

I don't know. I have been taken to task by Jana and other friends for not having downloaded and played all the available Sam & Max episodes yet. (It's on my list! Honest!!!!)

But I digress.

Check out the interview with Dan Conners here:
Q&A: Telltale's Connors On Episodic Gaming's Future

I don't know if it'll turn into a sustained trend or not (it sure seems to be the case with text-based IF). But it's nice to see that thanks to the indies, rumors of the death of entire game genres have been greatly exaggerated.

Labels: Adventure Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:59 AM (Permalink)