Ron Gilbert Back Into Making Graphic Adventure Games
You know, I really didn't have much reason to be interested in the upcoming Penny Arcade game, except for the fact that it's being developed in Torque (my game engine of choice). But now I learn that they've managed to get Ron "Monkey Island" Gilbert involved! And it'll be episodic!

"Gabe" (Mike Krahulic) said today:

We had our first meeting with Ron pretty early in the design process. Tycho and I were getting the story fleshed out and we had some ideas about the design and over all pace of the game. We laid it all out for Ron and then he picked up a whiteboard marker and started teaching class. I’m not sure how many people can say they got a game design 101 course taught by Ron Gilbert, but that’s exactly what Tycho and I got that day. His insights into the way you move the player through an interactive story so that they get to explore the world but don’t loose the narrative were incredible. He was drawing diagrams and helping us really visualize the game in a way that had never even occurred to us. We’re ridiculously lucky to have him on board and helping us with On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode One.

I like Penny Arcade, though the humor gets a little crude for my tastes at times. But with Ron associated with it, I'm gonna have to at least give it a try. Graphic Adventure Gaming may be coming back home at last....

Hothead hasn't announced a publisher. They are a self-owned company in British Columbia focusing on (according to their website) "unique, addictive titles specifically targeted to underserved markets." Does this sound indie to you? It kinda does to me, too. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Either way, coolness.

Forums. Because They Are There.

Labels: Adventure Games, Indie Evangelism

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:00 AM (Permalink) links to this post   

 
Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened First Impressions
I discovered the roleplaying game "Call of Cthulhu" back in the early 80's, when it was one of the first major horror-themed dice-and-paper roleplaying games (if not the first). It was principally written by Sandy Peterson, who later went on to do computer games like Doom, Quake, and Age of Empires. I'd always hoped he'd do a Cthulhu-based computer game, but so far... no dice, though there have been a couple of games since then that have been inspired by Lovecraft's stories. Because of the game, I discovered Lovecraft's horror stories, which generally involved a very smart (or at least competent) protagonist discovering to their horror the truth about the dark things that go bump in the night, and end up somewhat insane at the end of the story.

I'm a more recent convert to the stories of Sherlock Holmes, having recently read The Hound of the Baskervilles and finding it to be way, way better than I'd imagined (and better than I'd remembered some of the Sherlock Holmes short stories I'd read many years ago).

And now, there's a game that combines the two. Tuesday night, I bought Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened, a 3D adventure game that pits Sherlock Holmes against Cthulhu. Literally, though probably not directly. I am not kidding, and it is actually pretty cool so far. And if the game DOES end up in a one-on-one cage match between Holmes and Cthulhu, I'm sorry Sherlock, but my money is on the Great Old One.

Now, first things first. Some Bad. The game is something like 2 gigs in size, which is a monstrous download. And I didn't see an option to order a CD-ROM / DVD-ROM version here in the U.S., though I'm not sure its unavailable. But that was an all-night download. Not a big deal, but if you don't have broadband, you better hook up with a friend with broadband and a CD-ROM Burner or you aren't going to be the least bit happy.

Speaking of CD-ROM Burners... I hope you can get them to work. Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened uses a protection scheme by StarForce. Yeah, those crazy Russians who think crippling your machine is their right by virtue of you paying money to one of their clients. Oh, and who also think that they have the right to support pirates of your game if you choose NOT to lock down your game with their software.

I have no idea why Starforce drivers have to be installed when the game doesn't even ship on DVD-ROM (Though, at least they do provide a URL where you can go to download the uninstaller. Gee, how thoughtful... Too bad they weren't thoughtful enough to INCLUDE IT WITH THE INSTALLATION. ) Anyway - if I'd known StarForce "protection" (which somehow in my mind equates to paying the mafia for "protection") was on the game, I'd probably have reconsidered my purchase decision. But now I can warn you.

Maybe this was actually a clever plan by Frogames, the developer, to get you into the mood to play a game about horror and psychotic cultists. Installing those drivers certainly made me feel horrified and vulnerable. But if that doesn't bug you enough to scare you away (and there are plenty of people out there for whom that would be enough), then here's a quick dump of the first half-hour or so of playing the game.

The game opens with Watson in his bed (without covers - no wonder he's got a sleep disorder) having nightmares about cults and monstrous horrors. Obviously, the dude has been through some rough stuff and has lost a few sanity points dealing with Cthulhu Mythos. Those of us who have played the Call of Cthulhu RPG know what's going on here. Anyway, he wakes up, and then you hear his mental dialog about how this all began.

Flashback to two years earlier. The camera runs along the cobblestoned streets of London as opening credits fade in and out. The sign "Baker Street" is clearly visible, and the camera moves to a door with the famous address, "221b". The camera moves up and zooms on the world-famous detective, gazing out the window.

A cutscene follows, with Sherlock expressing a peevishness at not having any cases to be found that challenge him. Watson assures him one will turn up, and suggests he takes an evening stroll to the local bookstore. And then the game begins (or is it, "The game is afoot?")

The game is played in the first-person perspective, with you as Sherlock Holmes. At least so far. Maybe you get to play as Watson (or --- wouldn't this be cool --- CTHULHU! Now there's an idea I'd happily pay $30 for...) later in the game. But thus far, it's kind of an FPS game (First Person Sleuthing). Interesting things start to happen very shortly, as a man's dissapearance reveals some strange and disturbing hints that something a little more disturbing than a phantom hound is may be involved in this disappearance and several other related missing persons cases.

I'm hardly a scholar on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's work, but so far the dialog in in the game seems to be pretty close to what I'd expect in a Sherlock Holmes story. The voice acting can be somewhat painful at times, but at least the voice of Sherlock Holmes is pretty competent.

The 3D graphics aren't close to cutting edge, but they are nice, relatively sharp, and very *useable* in a game where much of the gameplay revolves around you being able to spot anomalies as clues. The 3D representation of London is very attractive, I should add, if sparsely populated (a good thing, if unrealistic - I can't imagine trying to sort through a bustle of people trying to find the people I am supposed to talk to).

Gameplay-wise, there is some funkiness with getting stuck on collision volumes. And like many other adventure games I remember from back when they were popular, you do get into certain situations where you are trying to guess what else you need to do so the game will let you progress. When I quit my first session last night, it was after I had obtained several clues, including two that needed to be inspected under a microscope. But the game wouldn't let me return to 221b Baker Street because I hadn't gathered enough evidence yet. Nor would it let me follow some footprints through a gate because I had "no reason to go there." Apparently Sherlock is a bit more methodical than myself, and can't jump to any conclusion like, "Hmmm... footprints.... through a gate. I wonder if I should follow them through that gate?"

Ah, well. Maybe Sherlock knows something I don't know.

It's not a high-budget, "AAA" game by any stretch. Fortunately, I'm not a AAA snob. Assuming I can figure out what Sherlock's hang-up is, I'm liking the game so far. There's detail where it's important, particularly in the clues, reports, and documents that Holmes acquires during the course of the game.

And - though it's only been hinted at so far - it's about FREAKING CTHULHU!!!!! Cthulhu by gaslight, baby! Lovecraftian horror! Even if there's not a single supernatural event that takes place during the entire mystery - it's all death-cultists and superstition and bizarre rites without any evidence of the existance of the tentacle-faced god who's gonna devour the Earth for breakfast once he's finished sleeping in - it's just too cool of a concept not to enjoy.

Anyway, I'll report back on it once I've had more time to sink my teeth into it. I confess, part of the thrill I'm getting from the game (warts and all) comes just from playing an adventure game again. Those have been in short supply of late (well, except by some indies, who apparently have been cranking out text adventures at a rate that Infocom and Scott Adams in their hayday couldn't imagine).


(Vaguely) related half-heard, half-imagined memories of insane mutterings of a disturbing nature overheard in the darkness that seemed to throb with the pulse of evil:
* The Top Ten Graphic Adventures of All Time
* Sherlock Holmes Investigates Cthulhu
* Indie Interview With Mike Rubin
* A Twisty Little Maze of Passages, All Different


Read Or Post Comments on the Forums

Labels: Adventure Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 12:27 AM (Permalink) links to this post   

 
Mike Rubin On In-Game Cinematics, Indie Style
For those with a somewhat more technical bent (and any of us working with the Torque Game Engine, and anyone interested in what indies are doing in the "Adventure Game" genre), Mike Rubin has an outstanding article on the trials and tribulations of working on in-game cinematic sequences for his upcoming 3D Interactive Fiction title, Vespers 3D.

Every time I read about the progress on this game, I get more and more excited for the final result.

Anyway, I've shamelessly swiped a screenshot to lure you over to the article to check it out.

Vespers 3D: Adventures In Cinematics

Enjoy!


(Vaguely) related evidence that I should take a vow of silence:
* Indie Interview: Mike Rubin
* Vespers 3D Progress
* Utah Indie Developer Night Report: Winter 2007


READ OR POST COMMENTS ON THE FORUM

Labels: Adventure Games, programming

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:50 AM (Permalink) links to this post   

 
The Top Ten Graphic Adventures of All Time
According to IGN, in ascending order, these are the top ten graphic adventure games of all time.

#10: Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards
#9: Myst
#8: Police Quest II: The Vengeance
#7: Shadowgate
#6: Sam & Max Hit the Road
#5: Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge
#4: King's Quest V: Absense Makes The Heart Go Yonder
#3: Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle
#2: The Longest Journey
#1: Grim Fandango

Aw, man. This makes me nostalgic for the early 90's. When Sierra was king of the hill, mainly for their adventure games, and LucasArts wasn't far behind.

Do I have a problem with this list? Hey, these lists are supposed to foster debate and discussion, right? And yeah. I do. Kinda. I can't believe the first Gabriel Knight game isn't on there somewhere. Since I never played Shadowgate, I don't care if that one gets bumped... :) I would also expect to see the first Alone in the Dark game to be on the list somewhere. Maybe it had too many action elements to be considered part of this august group for purists, but it was an adventure game. And it did have graphics!

And, I'm now sad to say, I never played the Longest Journey. I'm amazed it's in the second-place slot. In my heart, Monkey Island 2 is the second best graphic adventure game of all time.

Grim Fandango - I agree wholeheartedly with it being #1. This game just worked on so many levels. It was just amazing. For such weird characters (they were almost all skeletons), I sure found myself caring about them and their story. Alas, this game doesn't agree too well with modern operating systems, so few people can appreciate it now.

Check out the full article HERE.

Labels: Adventure Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:00 AM (Permalink) 8 comments links to this post   

 
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) 3 comments links to this post   

 
Top 20 Freeware Adventure Games of 2006
Independent Gaming has a round-up of the Top 20 Freeware Adventure Games of 2006. For the puzzle-solving impaired, they have included a walkthrough for every game, as well.

Many of them look a fair sight better than many adventure games I played and enjoyed in the late 80's. I tried the Indiana Jones game briefly, and it seemed to retain the flavor of the old LucasArts SCUMM engine games, albeit a overly wordy in the intro. The Missing sounds really intriguing. Unfortunately, some of these games are just "works in progress" released as demos to the public. But free is a good price, and now I just have to find the time.

Labels: Adventure Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 10:00 AM (Permalink) 0 comments links to this post   

 
Adventure Game Revival on the Nintendo Wii?
Gamasutra has an interesting article by Scott Nixon about the possibility of reviving the Adventure Game genre by moving over to the consoles - specifically, the Nintendo Wii.

Would this work? Do gamers just need "more interaction" from the WiiMote controller to make adventure games exciting again?

I don't know. But the idea is at least intriguing. Check out the article and judge for yourself:

Bring Out Your Dead! Can Nintendo Breathe New Life Into Adventure Games?

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Labels: Adventure Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 10:51 AM (Permalink) 0 comments links to this post   

 
Vespers 3D Progress
Mike Rubin has written a great article on the current progress of Vespers 3D, the 3D Indie Interactive fiction game I interviewed him about last year. Even if you aren't a developer, you can get some insight into the challenges he's facing on the project with the parser, voice recording, and so forth.

Check out the article HERE.



(Vaguely) related blabbering:
* Mike Rubin interview part I
* Mike Rubin interview part II
* Losing Your Limits Without Losing Your Mind
* How Do I Get Past The Harpies?

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Labels: Adventure Games, Indie Evangelism

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 11:14 AM (Permalink) 2 comments links to this post   

 
How to Turn Façade Into An RPG
Scorpia took me to task on my little CRPG definition from last week, but the discussions we've had here and on her site and here, I'm feeling a bit more confident about my breakdown. Though Gegi also offered a really good suggestion (an addition) that you need some level of choice over your character's attributes or development of their attributes over time for it to count.

The point of my breakdown is that while things like combat systems, storyline, inventory systems, and so forth are all very important, they are NOT the defining attributes of RPGs. For story --- well, it's too fuzzy of a line to draw. Almost every game has a story, even if its just a simple one-line setup. There's definitely a qualitative difference between the story of, say, Empires and Dungeons, and Final Fantasy VII.

So as a fun design experiment, I thought about what it would take to turn a non-RPG into an RPG. Specifically, let's take one without combat of any kind and see how it might be done. As an amusing example, let's take the experimental indie game, or "interactive story", Façade. I consider it to be an adventure game, personally. A very unusual one. But that kind of gameplay. ("Action-adventure?" Since timing is important...)

So, in playing Façade, you start out by choosing a name, and then knocking on the door of some old college friends, Grace and Trip. You use typed text to hold a conversation with them, and you can also manipulate certain objects in the apartment. The game can branch many ways, but in general you discover that Grace and Trip are having marital problems. As an interested third-party, you influence them in several directions, or simply leave the status quo the way it is. And you can get thrown out of the apartment for being too rude (been there, done that!)

So lets see how to turn this into an RPG. I'm not saying this would make a good GAME, necessarily (I don't actually think Façade is that great of a game to begin with, but it's an interesting experiment).

Step 1: Identifying with the Avatar
We'll start with criterion #4 (and add Gegi's suggestion), and give you more customization of and identification with your avatar. You are already pretty much acting in the first-person perspective, which adds some identification, but the game really has you playing yourself. The person through who's eyes you see doesn't really have an identity. So let's fix that.

Lets say you have a choice of backgrounds and two attributes / characteristics. For backgrounds, maybe you can choose whether you were, at one point, closer friends with Grace, Trip, or neither. Perhaps you could also choose to be an ex-boyfriend or girlfriend of either one, depending on the gender you chose. Maybe we'll add a profession as well. So you could be John, the artist and old friend of Grace's, or Jane, a doctor and Trip's former girlfriend. Or lots of combinations in-between. You are now playing SOMEONE ELSE, not just yourself.

On top of that, let's give you a choice of traits. Let's stay away from numbers, necessarily. Let's say you get to pick one trait that descibes your character - or at least how you are perceived by others. Funny, Sincere, Serious, Impulsive, Smart, Rich, Persuasive, and Argumentative.

Step 2: Your Avatar's Attributes
Now, we've got some interesting customizations for your character in the last step. Now we need to address criteria 1 and 2: You avatar's attributes need to influence the game, and there needs to be some randomness.

I'm not familiar with the AI or the nuts and bolts of the rules of Façade. But let's make things easy and say that rather than your responses always influencing the AI of Grace and Trip by a specific amount, instead it's fuzzy. So if a particular comment would normally irritate Grace by 5 points, it instead becomes a range. +/- 50%, so it can be anywhere from 3 to 7 points.

Now we've laid the foundation for your character's attributes to have an affect on the game. First off, your choice of backgrounds may influence the reactions of Trip and Grace. If you were a closer friend of Trip's, then maybe your actions will have a stronger influence on Trip, and your actions may be met with some suspicion by Grace. And so forth.

Your professional skill might give your actions a bit more credability when the conversation moves around to those topics. For example, if you are a professional artist, then any time the conversation moves around to art, you might get a bonus to your credability and the "weight" of your comments. So instead of 3-7 points, maybe you get 4-8 points for how much your words influence the AI of either character in ANY direction.

Your chosen trait also plays a roll. If you chose "Persuasive," you get a bonus to the chance to steer a conversation in a particular direction. If you choose "Funny," you have a bonus to any attempt to "lighten" the mood. Serious has the opposite effect. Impulsive reduces how much Grace or Trip get offended by your actions, since they are used to you being that way. If you are rich, there are some very definite bonuses that can occur in certain parts of the conversation. And so forth.

Step 3: Avatar Growth
Okay. We're now left with the third criterion --- your Avatar's attributes / traits must have a strong correlation with the progress in the game.

So now, we take Façade 2 and Façade 3 --- the second and third acts of the story (maybe each act takes place in a future date) and combine them together into one giant game. Between each act, you get to "level up." You get to choose one additional trait. This isn't necessarily the acquisition of a new trait, so much as it is also the perception of this trait within you by the NPCs. If you choose the same trait a second or third time, then you get two or three times the bonuses. They shouldn't be contradictory. If you choose both serious and funny, for example, you might be able to influence the tone of the conversation in either direction.

I've Created A Monster!
So now, do we have Façade, the RPG?

Well, we've now probably multiplied the content requirements by about 6x. Not only did we triple it by adding a second and third act, but we also increased the complexity by requiring that Trip and Grace respond to your chosen background information. The fact that you were Grace's ex-boyfriend could come up more than once in a conversation. And to take advantage of those professional skills, we need to make sure that the player who chose to be a doctor will have a few chances to throw their medical credentials around. That's a lot of additional conversation to create and record! Not to mention test.

We've also greatly increased the complexity of the game engine, and the AI. Adding a bit of randomization shouldn't be too hard, but figuring out all the bonuses that could apply could be a little tricky. And then there's game balance issues! Does choosing "rich" or an artist background give you undue power in the game? (Since the game really doesn't have an "objective," then arguably it doesn't.)

But I'd argue that, should we take upon ourselves this foolish task, what we've ended up with at the end is an RPG - the genuine article. There's no fantasy, no combat, no inventory system, and the storyline is extremely open-ended and untraditional.

But yes, I'd argue that at this point, we have an RPG.


(Vaguely) related steaming piles of insight:
* Non-Combat RPG: A Fool's Errand?
* The Rules of Role-Playing Games
* RPG Conversation Redesign
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Labels: Adventure Games, Free Games, Game Design, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:00 AM (Permalink) 0 comments links to this post   

 
Sherlock Holmes Investigates Cthulhu
Sherlock Holmes: I recently read "The Hound of the Baskervilles," and became a fan.

Cthulhu: I've been a fan for years.

Adventure Gaming: Decline, Shmeline. Looks like there are more than a few being produced, but they just aren't marketing with the big bucks anymore. I have loved 'em for many years.

Now, let's just COMBINE THEM ALL TOGETHER, now, shall we?!?!? By a company that apparently has a bit of clout, and has already done two other Sherlock Holmes games. Can't say I've played their other games, but now I may have to check 'em out.

Be sure and check out the trailer.

Apparently, it's already out in parts of Europe, and it is scheduled for UK and U.S. release around the end of February 2007. There's a German Demo (700 MB!) available already on Filefront. The gameplay is first-person perspective, but it switches to third person during cut-scenes. You alternate between playing Holmes and Watson.


Thanks to Raph for the tip!

Labels: Adventure Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 1:35 PM (Permalink) 0 comments links to this post   

 
The Worst Game Ever
So what was the worst video or computer game ever released? Man, the lists can be impressive. There's a lot of crap to choose from. I personally try to avoid games that I hear are truly bad, so I undoubtably have avoided some really spectacular failues. I have been rescued from pain by timely reviews or word-of-mouth.

So for me, it's going to have to be something personal. A game which, for whatever reason, spoke to me. By "speaking to me," I mean personally insulted me and all of my immediate kin, screaming profanity in my name. A game which not only sucked, but one which whispered promises of delights in my ear, but left me waking up in a bathtub of ice with my kidneys removed. A game with a name that inspires fear and anger as much as the name of a classic, beloved games fills me with nostalgic memories.

A game... like Trespasser. Yep, that's gotta be the one. For me, at least. Perhaps, this little venting of the spleen will allow me to let the healing start. Maybe.

The Hype
Trespasser was the "interactive sequel" to the second Jurassic Park movie. Which was pretty lame itself. It makes one wonder if Trespasser was Dreamwork's attempt to make the movie look good by showing how much worse it could have been. Oh, wait, they DID come out with Jurassic Park III, didn't they?

Okay. So the concept, design, and the previews made it sound awesome. You play a female character (oooh, progressive!) named Anne, voiced by none other than Minnie Driver. You crash-land on Isla Sorna, which is where the company InGen did it's primary Dinosaur R&D. Dinos have taken over the island, and you have to somehow survive and escape the island. And to make it more realistic, there was no HUD (Heads-up-display, gaming parlance taken from the miltary to refer to the stats and game information appearing on the screen that you shouldn't actually see). To see your health, you look down at your own cleavage, upon which is tatooed a heart which fades gradually as your health drops. Okay, so maybe the concept wasn't entirely without it's flaws.

The lead developer, Seamus Blackley, was an alumnus of Looking Glass Studio, and had previously worked on such System Shock, Flight Unlimited, and Terra Nova. His concept, as I understood it, was to combine realistic physics and AI to create a truly organic, open-ended adventure game. The dinosaurs would be driven by needs and primitive instincts, and the objects in the game would demonstrate real-world properties. So you could come up with your own clever solutions to manipulate the environment. This is a tall order, but considering his pedegree, I expected him to pull it off. Not perfectly, of course, but it should at least shake up the idea behind adventure gaming.

Oh, and while there would be firearms, it wouldn't be a shooter. Okay, good. It sounded like the ultimate action / adventure game to me. I was all ready to fall in love with it.

Now, I can be pretty forgiving of flaws or deficiencies in games. I mean, I'm a big fan of indie games, which do lack the production values and sheer sets of features of mainstream games. Not that those are really flaws, but I know many hardcore gamers have a tough time looking past things like a game with "only" 2D graphics, or, say, the lack of mouse support in Aveyond. I'm pretty lenient reviewer. I try to avoid judging a game by my expectations and comparisons to similar games (though that's impossible to do entirely), but instead focus on what it is, and what it is trying to achieve. This allows me to compare, say, Oblivion with the far-more-primitive Ultima IV. Maybe it's a flaw as a game designer. But I like to approach every game with as much of an open mind as I can.

I actually got Trespasser the day AFTER it appeared on the shelves. I was too busy at work on the day it was released, but some friends at the office (who actually had the luxury of being able to go HOME that night) picked it up with high expectations. The next day, they came to work with tales of woe, and how horrible the game was.

I protested, knowing that my coworkers were hardcore FPS fans. "You don't understand, it's a different kind of game," I insisted. "It's an adventure game, not a shooter."

"We know that," they insisted. "That's why we got it. You just have to play it. You'll see."

So I did. I bought Trespasser that afternoon, and took it home with optimism tempered by my coworkers' dire warnings. I reduced my expectations, realizing that the game was certainly going to have its flaws. But that was okay. The only thing that mattered was if the game was FUN.

The Truth Is In There
So the game started. Richard Attenborough's familiar voice explained the situation as a reading of his memoirs, and the initial setup was awesome. Washed up on a beach, an abandoned lab building or something up the hill, and all was quiet. Just like a good horror movie.

And just like a horror movie, the true horror gradually showed itself.

First off, there was the wonderful waldo-simulator that was the principle game interface. Apparenly, Anne of the Tattooed Cleavage was some kind of mutant with one very very funky arm. Controlling this arm was an exercise in frustration. Doing it successfully required the level of control necessary to consistently succeed at a claw vending machine. I saw two teenaged girls who could do that once. They pulled a plush animal out of the machine with every coin. After that, they took requests from my daughters for any plush toy near the top of the stack. I imagine they would have done pretty well at the interface to Trespasser. But they would have quit in disgust from all the other bugs.

For one thing, this mutant arm would get stuck on things. I would walk through a door, unaware that somehow my hand had gotten stuck on the door frame. I wouldn't notice this until I had walked about fifty feet, and find out I couldn't use the complicated waldo-controls to bring my arm in front of me to pick up an interesting stick. Then I'd turn around and discover that my arm had stretched out behind me the entire fifty feet. Yes, Reed Richards or Elastigirl would be proud of Anne. But unfortunately, too often I couldn't just jiggle the waldo-controls to free her hand. Instead, I'd have to WALK back to the other side of the door to retrieve my own hand.

Then there was the physics simulations. Physics in the world of Trespasser was pretty different from physics of the real world. For one thing, there was no friction in this world. Energy didn't get converted / absorbed on collisions. No. No, what would happen would be that you'd put your pistol down gently on a slight incline so you could try to stack boxes (since you had only one "inventory" slot). The pistol on this ten-degree slope would then proceed to ROLL down the slope. Not just slide, no. ROLL. End-over-end. In slow-motion. So you'd do a little stacking, trying to prevent the boxes from sliding off of each other, stop, grab your slowly rolling pistol so it didn't drop down to where the Velociraptors were hanging out, move it back up next to you, and go back to stacking boxes that refused to actually stack while keeping track of your pistol rolling at a speed of about six feet per minute.

The end result was that you were constantly juggling objects in the world that utterly refused to stand still.

Still, I persevered. I mean, this was a whole New Concept for a game, right? Surely there'd be a glitch or two. But like an uncut diamond, there was sure to be a gem of great value hidden within the ugly stone. I'd keep digging.

Unfortunately, the organic and open-ended gameplay promised by the game never really materialized. The advanced AI of the dinosaurs appeared no different from scripted AI of any other game. I mean, the velociraptors (as far as I got) were always out to kill you. Sure, there was one scene where a Tyranosaurus was preoccupied with fighting another dinosaur and you had to stay out from underfoot, but that was pretty much the extend of things. If the velociraptors were using some kind of clever pack behavior, I missed it as I saw them pacing blindly beneath me as I stood on a beam trying to prevent my pistol from slowly rolling over the frictionless edge.

And the physics puzzles? Pretty much box-stacking (with greased boxes) or stack-knocking-over. Pre-scripted. The physics was limited to very specific items only. Sure, if you ran out of bullets, you could actually CLUB the dinos with your rifle, or a fragment of a door that you smashed open earlier, which was admittedly pretty cool. But I was deliberately searching for clever solutions "outside the box," and I found very, very few. The dinosaurs weren't possible to simply fend off or outsmart. It pretty much came down to trying to shoot them with an impossibly weird aiming system (imagine trying to shoot a rifle one-handed while holding it as far away from you as your arm can reach. That's pretty much the "challenge" of the game), and then trying to club them over the head with an empty gun when you run out of bullets.

The straw that broke the camel's back was when I arrived at the town. Admittedly, my machine wasn't entirely bleeding edge, but it was more than powerful enough to handle all of the games of the era (including Unreal, I later discovered, which was lamented as a "pretty slideshow" by too many gamers with less powerful systems). But when I arrived in town, my framerate dropped to unplayable levels. Something like 3 frames per second. I took a few painful steps, and then a velociraptor teleported next to me. Though it looked like he had teleported in via the transporter on the Starship Enterprise during an episode in which they were having "transporter malfunctions." The dino appeared inside a fence, half on one side, half on the other. It shrieked and hissed (I know I would, too, so the AI felt very realistic at that point), unable to escape its merger with a wooden fence. I would have felt pity for it, if a minute later (which was how long it took me to take maybe a dozen steps) another raptor hadn't appeared out of nowhere and killed me instantly. I didn't even have time to look down at my breasts to see if my heart-shaped tatoo was fading.

I tried several times, trying to turn the detail levels down to "nothing." Nothing worked. Well, I mean that nothing that I tried worked to salvage the game... there wasn't a "nothing" detail setting that worked. Though that would have been strangely appropriate. The game was simply unplayable from that point on.

Aftermath
The next day, I returned, shame-faced, to my coworkers and admitted to them that they were both correct and very wise. I returned the game to the Software, Etc. store where I'd purchased it. They only allowed a trade, so I desperately searched for another game that I was interested in that I knew DIDN'T SUCK. Unfortunately, the only one of equivalent price was a copy of Unreal --- a game which I could buy from the company store (we'd been bought by GT Interactive, Unreal's publisher, by that point) for a third of its retail cost. It didn't matter. By this point, I was so disgusted by Trespasser that I just wanted to put some physical distance between me and the game, and I'd like to feel my money wasn't COMPLETELY wasted.

But apparently, the scars remain.

Incidentally, that same year, Blackley's former company released Thief: The Dark Project, and later Thief 2, which I thought captured the type of gameplay promised by Trespasser. And the budget "sci-fi hunting game" title Carnivores captured the whole man-against-dinosaur thrills almost present in Trespasser. So the actual concept - the idea behind Trespasser - was demonstrably sound. It's just that the design and execution were fumbled horribly.

Since then, a wonderful postmortem has explained just how such a wonderful idea crashed and burned. This is perhaps the single, salvageable good thing to emerge from the wreckage. And, in the tradition of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, a group of honest-to-goodness fans have emerged to try to convert the sow's ear into a silk purse. And I do have to admit that the game did bring me some enjoyment for perhaps the first fifteen minutes or so. So perhaps it is not the objective worst game of all time, nor even the worst failure of all time. That last prize probably goes to E.T. the Extraterrestrial for the Atari 2600... he game that destroyed the system... but as I never owned a 2600 nor had to personally experience the horror of that game, except for a few minutes at a friend's house before swapping out the cartridge for Missile Command, it doesn't burn in my memory like Trespasser.

But for me, when we talk of how much a game sucks, Trespasser set the high bar for craptastic-ness that has yet to be exceeded. It is my Eye of Argon for computer games.


(Vaguely) related musings on the Nature of Suckage:
* Why Battlefield 2 Sucks
* Quality Ain't Easy
* Polish: Attention to Detail
* How To Get Me To Buy Your Indie RPG
.

Labels: Adventure Games, Game Design, Mainstream Games, retro

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 12:26 AM (Permalink) 6 comments links to this post   

 
Interview with Georgina Bensley, Creator of Cute Knight
Hanako Games is an indie game studio known for their anime-style, "Girl-Friendly" adventure and RPG titles. The latest game, Cute Knight, is an entertaining blend of a Sim and an RPG, borrowing heavily from the Japanese title, "Princess Maker." Cute Knight features a randomly-generated dungeon, a crafting system, a unique magic system, over fifty different endings (with variations on each!), and scores of special in-game events. It won the GameTunnel.com "indie RPG of the year" award, and just in the last few months has achieved a prominant position on several major portals, possibly ushering in the era of the "Casual RPG."

After a great deal of arm-twisting and negotiation, I managed to secure this interview with the enigmatic Georgina Bensley (well, okay, she's actually pretty accessible, and all I had to do was ask). Georgina is the ow ner of Hanako Games, and the creator (with help) of Cute Knight. She was able to give me a lot of dirt on some of the inner workings of Cute Knight (especially its unusual magic system), with plenty of hints and strategies. We also talk about the state of adventure gaming, her upcoming project (a replayable adventure game!), her game design philosophy, and more fun stuff.

Enjoy!


Getting Started

Rampant Coyote: First off, how about a little about yourself? Who are you, and what made you take the plunge as an indie game developer?

Georgina: My name is Georgina Bensley and I make computer games!

[audience applause]

Thank you, thank you.

As for how I got here - Ever since I was very young, I've been - not an entrepreneur exactly, but open to opportunity. In grade school, I used to make little arts and crafts trinkets to sell for cash and the desserts from other people's lunchboxes. Later it was websites and ebay. It seemed natural to me that if I could make something, I ought to at least see if people were willing to pay for it.

So there wasn't a plunge, exactly. I've always been making/trying to make games. When I made something that I thought was good enough that someone else might be interested, I put it on sale.


Rampant Coyote: I dug around on your "About" page, and found out about the ColecoVision. It sounds like you were a fan of the underdog games or gaming systems from the early days. Do you have any favorite games on that platform?

Georgina: What comes to mind as my personal favorite from that time period would be the ColecoVision port of Mr. Do!. I really loved that game, I can't even explain why.

The other thing that was noteworthy about the ColecoVision was that, at least for my family, it really was a family system. Everybody used it. My mother was really into Lady Bug. As the video game industry developed, it somehow moved more and more away from that. It wasn't until several years ago when I started to find games like Text Twist online that I could once again say "I bet my mother would like this."


Rampant Coyote: Besides the ColecoVision titles, are there any other games out there that are favorites or that you think were influential to you as a game developer?

Georgina: I was a big fan of the 'Quest' games from Sierra - King's Quest, Space Quest, and so on, as well as RPG classics like Fallout and Planescape Torment.


Rampant Coyote: Are there any particular indie games out there right now that you particular enjoy or admire?

Georgina: Aveyond is an obvious choice. I'm also really fond of Eets. I don't usually buy puzzle games because I'm afraid that once I've solved all the levels, there will be nothing left to do and no reason to ever play again. With that game's wacky physics, completing a level doesn't mean that you've found the ONLY solution - you might be able to go back and score trophies by solving it in a completely unexpected and bizarre way. And then there's the level editor and the community-made puzzles... and did I mention the animations are adorable?


Cute Knight

Rampant Coyote: Okay, let's talk about your latest game, Cute Knight, Besides drawing the obvious inspiration to the "Princess Maker" series (which I still haven't played), did you draw inspiration for the game from any other games or other media?

The "stepwise 3D" dungeons of course reminded me of Wizardry, the Bard's Tale, the old "Gold Box" AD&D games, Dungeon Master, and many similar games from the 80's and early 90's.

Georgina: I looked at a lot of those games when I was designing the dungeon section. The game from that genre that I most remember playing during that time period was something called Alternate Reality: The City. The game included a huge list of potions, and while you could guess what a potion was from its color and flavor (sweet, salty, so on) you couldn't be entirely sure whether you'd found fruit juice or deadly poison until you drank it.

This inspired some of Cute Knight's potion choices, especially the visually-identical Rainbow Potions. Most potions, once you've learned what they all look like, you can use safely even if your character doesn't have the brewing skill to identify them. With a Rainbow potion, if your skill isn't high enough to tell, it could do just about anything.


Rampant Coyote: The magic system in Cute Knight is quite unusual and seems fairly subtle. My usual strategy is just to load up on 3-element charms (when I get them) for fighting the monsters in the dungeons and cover as wide a spread of elements as possible. Sort of a shotgun approach to spellcasting. Probably not the most effective. Can you explain the inner workings of the magic system a little?

Georgina: I wanted to make magic a little more involved than just "cast a Generic Spell and do damage based on your magic skill". I remember playing Dragon Warrior on the Nintendo and having spells like HURT and HURTMORE. That definitely wasn't the feeling I wanted - that makes magic seem boring.

A lot of the RPG features in the game are slightly simplified and might not appeal to the sort of player who writes strategy guides about which spells can be cast a fraction of a second faster in order to do more damage in Diablo. I wanted the magic system to be able to be incredibly complicated in order for that sort of player to explore it, but also to work fairly well even for a player who didn't want to think about it. You can just pick three copies of the very first charm unlocked and you'll still be able to fight most monsters with magic. You may not do as much dam age as you would if you had the best charms equipped, but you'll get by.

There are nine elements - Earth, Air, Water, Fire, Light, Dark, Holy, Nature, and Emotion. If you want to blast down a door, the best elements to use are Earth and Fire. If you want to fight a vampire, the best elements to use are Holy and Light. Plant monsters will be weak against Nature. Only creatures with feelings are weak against Emotion, and those are the ones you get Sin for killing. A Fire elemental will be weak to Water but may take no damage at all if you attack with pure Fire. If you have a good Luck score, you can encounter a monster, figure out what it's weak against, then run away and change your charms to be appropriate for that monster before coming back to fight.

For the number-crunchers, here's the details - your base magical damage is about 1/10 of your Magic skill. Half of that is considered 'pure' magic damage, and the other half is 'elemental' damage. The elemental damage is broken up into chunks depending on how many magical elements you're using. If your elements were half Fire, then half the elemental damage will be fire damage. That amount is then compared to the monster's resistance to Fire and raised or lowered accordingly before it's added to the total damage. And so on for the other elements you 're using. If you've got certain magical items equipped you can get bonus elemental damage. If your charm cards are pure Water but you have a Fire magic item equipped, you do all your elemental damage as water damage plus some extra as fire damage. And if you don't have all three card slots filled, your elemental damage is lowered.


Rampant Coyote: How about the Wizard's challenge? It seems to be one of the most detailed of the sub-games in Cute Knight. Sparky and Mortimer are pretty easy to beat, though it seems like Sparky emphasizes fire-based spells and Mortimer emphasizes emotion and dark magics, so I've found a few charms that appear to be relatively 'safe bets' when dueling them. But they are also weak enough to overpower by brute force at later stages of the game.

The higher-level wizards seem to have a much wider selection of charms, and defeating them f eels more random.

Georgina: The Wizard's challenge takes the magic system's complication and goes even further, giving each of the nine elements a rating against the other eight. It's like rock-scissors-paper but with nine symbols and the ability to play up to three of them at a time. This was fun to make, but it came out being TOO complicated. It's not really a fair game, and it may be revamped in a later version...


Rampant Coyote: Since I'm asking you about hints - Cute Knight is full of little special in-game events. Some of these seem very rare, and will rarely be encountered by players. This definitely encourages exploration of the game. Do you care to give any hints about seldom-discovered secrets or easter-eggs in the game?

Georgina: Some things not everyone knows about -

When prompted to name your character, if you just click OK without typing anything, your character ends up being named Michiko. This is the name I use for the character when talking to artists or testers. Saves having to say "the pink-haired PC" all the time!

You get a small Charm bonus on May Day in honor of romance.

If you diligently work as a maid for the first six months or so of the game, you receive the Magic Mop, which can turn a maid into a great hero. People have gone on to defeat the dragon using that mop. :)


Rampant Coyote: I think I found a magic mop for sale during one of the festivals. I wasn't quite sure how it worked. But my cleaning skill wasn't so high. Anyway - the big question: Should we expect a Cute Knight 2 2 ?

Georgina: Yes, but not for a long time. I am currently involved in another project, which is taking quite a while to complete. So look for a sequel in a couple of years...


The Game Biz

Rampant Coyote: The game business is pretty male-dominated, but you come in as a female game developer who is also producing "girl-friendly" games. Has this been advantageous or more challenging to you? Or both? And has the community been supportive?

Georgina: Once we get past the initial "Really? I've never met a female game developer before!" I don't think it really matters that much to anyone in the business. I'm just a person like anyone else. And since the casual/downloadable market has a high percentage of female customers, there isn't the same sort of push to make everything appeal to the mythical 18-year-old male football fan that some advertisers are supposedly so fond of.

It's in freeware game development communities that I'm more likely to have problems, not the indie community. A lot of freeware kids are just that - kids, teenage boys who don't understand why anyone would want to make games that aren't Zombie Splatterfest XX.


Rampant Coyote: A lot of the attitude in the business (particularly mainstream publishers) is that "girl-friendly" games means dress-up, shopping, and ... pink. What do you think it means to make "girl-friendly" games? And should I be embarrassed about liking Cute Knight (who does have pink hair, I note...) myself?

Georgina: One reason that I prefer "girl-friendly" over just "girl games" is that I don't think I know precisely what girls like either. I know what I like. I know some things that supposedly are more popular with female players than other things. But people like different things. Some girls play Quake. Not me, thanks. And I wouldn't be any more interested in Quake if you dyed it pink and made it about roaming the mall attacking passersby with make-up kits. (What a dreadful idea!)

Girl-friendly, to me, means that a female player shouldn't feel excluded by the game. There are lots of subtle ways that mainstream game developers can show that they don't really expect girls to play. Default high-score lists filled with male names. Selection between male-only character options. Claiming to have equal options for male and female characters, but actually having twice as much content available for male PCs as female ones. Always showing female characters within the story as weak and helpless. Things like that. I don't think anyone, male or female, should feel ashamed to play a game that's girl *friendly*. :)

You could say that Cute Knight includes dress-up (choosing what equipment to wear), shopping (buying/selling items) and pink (the hair!). But except for the pink hair, you'd find those things in any RPG.


Rampant Coyote: What tools do you use to make your games? Do you use a particular game engine, toolkit, or SDK (Software Development Kit) for the game itself? How about for the art?

Georgina: I primarily build games with Game Maker. While it bills itself as being able to make simple games without a single line of code, it also has its own scripting language, and that's what I'm using. Once you know the tool, there's a huge amount that can be done with it. Any sort of 2D game is possible.

I'm interested in checking out some other systems like the Torque Game Builder in order to be able to port beyond Windows, but so busy, so much to do...

For art, I have a very old version of Paint Shop Pro and a scanner.


Rampant Coyote: When designing a game, what do you come up with first - the story, or the game mechanics? Do you start with a detailed design document? How do you approach game design?

Georgina: It's hard to say exactly because I usually have a lot of half-baked ideas mulling around in my head. Eventually the pieces fit together and I see an overall gameplay concept that includes both the basic mechanics and at least the seed of a story. After that they tend to develop together. The game's needs can influence the story.

For Cute Knight I did write down a lot of design details early on. I knew it would be difficult to shoehorn a new skill in later, so I wanted to be sure I'd thought out the possibilities as far as skills and jobs before I started putting code together.


Rampant Coyote: I played your free adventure, "Sweet Dreams" (but I never could figure out how to wake the girl up), and you also bill "Summer Schoolgirls" as a sim / adventure. Are you a fan of adventure games / "interactive fiction?" If so, what do you think it might take for this kind of game to make a comeback?

Georgina: I'm a fan of both graphical and text adventures, and the graphical adventure genre really isn't as dead as some reviewers make it out to be. :) It's funny, because I'm constantly reading reviews for adventure games in which the reviewer takes a few paragraphs to expound upon how nobody plays or makes these games anymore. It doesn't seem to occur to them that they're writing those paragraphs pretty often for a genre that's supposedly dead.

It's a niche, that's all.

I wouldn't really want them to "come back" and replace first-person shooters as the big mainstream game genre. Then they'd end up being more expensive and requiring the latest-greatest graphics cards to play!

Both graphical and text adventures also have large fan communities making games, some of which are very good, and some of which go commercial.


Rampant Coyote: If budget wasn't a concern (yeah, right!), what game would you be creating right now?

Georgina: If you gave me a pile of money for development right now, I'd keep working on the same game I'm working on. I'd just hire actors to get the whole thing fully voiced. :) Dreadful voice acting is a common complaint in small-studio games and I would rather have none at all than acting that makes everyone wince. If I could afford a top-rate cast, that'd be different.

But once that's finished, if I had so much budget that I could found a studio to work with me AND not have to worry about sales figures, I have this great idea for a game in the style of Fallout. :)


Various and Sundry

Rampant Coyote: Okay - cage match. Rhen (from Aveyond) versus the Cute Knight. How would it end?

Georgina: Well, the person challenged gets the choice of weapons, right?

Michiko chooses a bake-off.


Rampant Coyote: Any hints as to what might be next from Hanako Games?

Georgina: My current project is an adventure game (see, they're not dead!) called Fatal Hearts. It has a teenage female protagonist and a terrible mystery with hints of murder, occultism, and things that should not be.... Which, for an adventure game, is not that unusual. What is different is that there's not just one ending, or even one best ending. Different characters and factions will be trying to win the player over to their side, and you can get an entirely different story with different puzzles depending on who
you choose to trust.

Most adventure games, once you finally get through them, that's it. You're done, there's no reason to play again. Or if there are multiple endings, you have to start over and play almost exactly the same game again in order to unlock the alternate end. This is different. If you reach one ending, you still have many hours of STORY that you haven't read, and puzzles you've never seen.

Also - gorgeous vampires.

http://hanakogames.com/fatal.shtml

If I'm lucky it'll be done sometime next year...


Rampant Coyote: An adventure game with honest-to-goodness replayability? This I'll have to see! I'm looking forward to checking it out.

Georgina, thank you for taking the time out of your development schedule for this interview! This was delightful!


If you are interested in some of the other games Georgina has worked on, be sure and visit http://www.hanakogames.com



(Vaguely) related Stories:
· Interview with Amanda Fitch, Indie RPG and Casual Game Designer
· Interview with Scorpia
· Interview with Mike Rubin (Vespers 3D, 3D Interactive Fiction)
· Aveyond!
· Tales from the Road: Cute Knight

Labels: Adventure Games, casual games, Interviews, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 2:00 AM (Permalink) 3 comments links to this post   

 
A Twisty Little Maze of Passages, All Different
> Kill Dragon

WITH WHAT, YOUR BARE HANDS?

I never had to answer that question myself. But that dragon was my first significant exposure to the world of computer games.

I didn't play the game myself. Instead, I was given a walkthrough by my buddy in fifth grade, Craig Bucher, who had played it over the weekend on some "minicomputer." I don't even know if the computer even had a monitor - the game was played on the printer, recording his explorations to be shared later. With the huge printout in hand, he took relish in showing me the most interesting parts. Through his printout, I was able to share in his adventure (which I didn't realize had the name, "Adventure," at the time). I witnessed him being attacked by nasty axe-throwing dwarves and giant snakes, saw him trying to deal with the "troll bridge," navigate the twisty little mazes of passages, and witnessed him face down a fierce green dragon sprawled out on a Persian rug.

I don't know why it was - but the fact that the dragon was on a Persian rug really stuck with me. For the rest of my life, my mental image of a dragon wasn't lounging Smaug-like on a bed of gold and silver, but rather sprawled out on a large, expensive Persian rug. My parents bought a Persian rug for our home, and I always thought it seemed a bit bare without a fierce green dragon on it.

I don't know if you could call my career and hobby of making videogames a "life's calling." But if you choose to, then you could say that I realized it on that winter morning. I was an avid reader, and here I was reading what looked like a book (or at least a short story) that had been written by the computer in reaction to my friend's voyages through an imaginary world. I was struck by the possibilities of it all.

I went home that night and wrote up something without the benefit of a computer on several pages of lined notebook paper. It was an adventure, and its format was vaguely reminiscent of a "choose your own adventure" book (I hadn't yet discovered Dungeons & Dragons). I worked on it for days, and filled several pages with text and options. Much was original, but it also had nasty little dwarves with axes, and the obligatory dragon sitting on a Persian rug.

When I felt all was ready, I ran my brothers through my adventure. I played the part of the computer, reading text according to their choices.

The entire adventure ran maybe five minutes, and that was including the time necessary to give them instructions. I'd apparently underestimated the content requirements by a hair. This is a problem I still struggle with today.

I taught myself to program on my first computer, a Sinclair ZX80, which lacked the capacity to actually run any of these games (one kilobyte of memory is apparently only enough for about a paragraph of text). Later, when we got the Commodore 64, I finally had enough memory (and storage space) to start making my dreams come true. First off, I was finally able to PLAY these adventure games myself, and finally follow in the footsteps of my friend. I finally encountered the fierce green dragon on the Persian rug, the axe-throwing dwarves, and the notorious TWISTY LITTLE MAZE OF PASSAGES for myself. And I was able to explore the Great Underground Empire, gathering the treasures I'd heard so much about. The experiences were satisfying and thrilling, but still a little short of what I'd felt a couple of years earlier.

But the best thing was that I was able to create these experiences. I started perhaps a dozen adventure games, most left incomplete in one form or another. I even collaborated with a schoolmate on one. I wouldn't go anywhere without my notebook full of maps and notes for my next awesome project. The two adventure games I actually finished, "The Dungeons of Doom" and "The Secret of Red Hill Pass" are long-gone now. And even at the time, I realized their weaknesses (though I thought they were a bit more sophisticated than the original Colossal Cave Adventure or Scott Adams' adventures). And of course, as I already knew the games intimately well, they weren't so much fun for me to play.

But it was during the development of these games that I felt the magic of the dragon on the Persian rug the strongest. I still get a taste of it in other games, some of which I record in my "Game Moments" articles. Part of my anticipation for Mike Rubin's Vespers 3D project is a hope to catch another taste of the magic, as I haven't really been able to get into pure text adventures again (though I've tried, and I don't fully understand why I haven't gotten very far). But those are enough to continue to drive me to play... and to create.

After all this time, that dragon is STILL there on that Persian rug. Oh, he's available in a free download, if anyone feels like challenging him - though I doubt the magic is still there. I don't think it ever was captured in the bits of data that made up the game. Where he really lived, for me, was in my mind. My imagination. The simplicity and abstraction of the text was what invited me to create him, to give him life, and to even give him some amount of power over me.

That was where the immersiveness came from. That's something that fantastic shaders and voice-overs cannot reproduce, and may even hinder (though I'm not quite willing to give them up and go back to text-only). It's all about capturing the imagination. Once that happens, the game - the medium - takes on a life of its own. The player is not just a consumer, an audience, but a participant, and the game becomes much more than the sum of its code and data.

And that's the power of the dragon.

In spite of all his power, the dragon was actually pathetically easy to slay. That was the whole trick. The key was to think outside of the box. It was to realize that in this new medium, the rules of the "real world" didn't necessarily apply. Adventurers were confounded, sometimes for weeks, sometimes forever, because they brought with them assumptions and baggage from the outside world with them into this new but familiar one. Because obviously, slaying a dragon is going to have to take something SPECTACULAR. Maybe something you haven't found yet. All the tricks that worked against the other monsters in the world failed utterly before the power of the dragon.

But the solution was both simple and outrageous. It was spectacular by being non-spectacular. It involved nothing that the adventurer didn't already have with him at the start of the game. For all his intimidating might, the dragon could be defeated by the simplest (but not the most obvious) means possible.

I lied when I said at the beginning of this article that I never had to answer that question myself. Sure, I knew the answer for the Colossal Cave Adventure. But as it set me on my path to making games, to trying to share that little bit of magic with others, particularly as an indie game developer with little resources. I haven't felt extremely successful at it. The dragon on his Persian rug keeps defeating me, as I find myself having to answer that question over and over again. But I keep trying.

I wonder if the answer is really any different?

> Kill Dragon

WITH WHAT, YOUR BARE HANDS?

> Yes.

CONGRATULATIONS! YOU HAVE JUST VANQUISHED A DRAGON WITH YOUR BARE HANDS (UNBELIEVABLE, ISN'T IT?)


(Vaguely) related rambles:
* How Do I Get Past the Harpies?
* Interview with Mike Rubin (developer of Vespers 3D)
* Losing Your Limits Without Losing Your Mind
* Interview with Scorpia
* How Do You Create "Fun?"

Labels: Adventure Games, Indie Evangelism, retro

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 8:00 AM (Permalink) 2 comments links to this post   

 
Game Moment #15 - Neuromancer
Neuromancer, the novel by William Gibson, blew my mind when I read it in the late 1980's. I think it blew the minds of a lot of people. It created the (short-lived) Cyberpunk genre. It was heady stuff when it was published, theorizing virtual reality mingled with a world-wide computer network before the "Internet" was in anyone's vocabulary. It combined a uniquely 1980's era dystopia with a vision of computers and communications melding seamlessly with everyday life - and even within the human body itself. The line between computer programs and the human mind was blurred, and the result was both tantalizing and nightmarish.

Very cool stuff. And more plausible every day. Well, except for the idea of the Soviet Union still being a major player.

Around 1988, the computer game based on the book was created. Published by Interplay, it was a graphic adventure / RPG hybrid by Troy Miles. It even included part of a song (horribly rendered in MIDI glory on the PC) by Devo (How's that for 1980's?). The graphics on the PC version were standard 320 x 200 16-color EGA, and not nearly as attractive as other EGA adventure games of the era.

I didn't get around to playing it until 1991, shortly before I became hooked on Wing Commander. I hadn't even heard of the game before, but I found it discounted for $20 at a little computer shop in northern California early that summer. I wasn't yet plugged back into the gaming scene, so like most uninformed gamers I was as likely swayed by the license as anything else. Although I was saving money for my upcoming wedding and the next two semesters of college (yeah, it was quite the summer), I figured $20 wasn't a very big risk. I bought the game and tried it out that night.

Instead of playing the hero of the novel, you instead played another hacker of a user-supplied name on a somewhat parallel journey. For an adventure game, Neuromancer had a surprisingly small number of physical locations. Most of the game took place along three streets in Chiba City, with a trip near the end-game into orbital space stations. The game borrowed descriptions and characters from the novel, but also included some of its own own humor to the setting. Like the "Church of Pong."

The segment of the game taking place in "meat-space" was almost pure graphic adventure game, with the exception of the flow of cash. There was no combat - saying the wrong thing, going somewhere unprepared, or simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time could get you killed, or arrested and fined. Like most games of its kind, you learned to save early and often to avoid re-tracing your steps after a disasterous experiment.

The other side of the game was "Cyberspace," where you upgraded your "cyberdeck" and your software to hack into computers. The combat was in real-time, but it didn't exactly require fast arcade reflexes. It involved analyzing the opposing computer's strengths and weaknesses, and using the right combination of intrusion software to force your way in.

Success netted you access to bank accounts to raid, clues to your next move in cyberspace or in meat-space, upgraded intrusion software, passwords to be used in systems that were too hard to hack through brute force, access to security systems or other controls which affected the meat-space world, background information on the world itself, and some amusing little side-stories. It was perhaps more interesting "treasure" than any +2 sword of ogre decapitation.

In spite of its second-rate graphics (even for the time), the game had something to make it powerfully compelling. It drew me into the world and left me thinking about it when I wasn't playing --- planning my next move, musing over puzzles I hadn't yet solved. As this was still prior to the era of the World Wide Web, the solutions were not to be found in a quick Google search.

No, I had to figure this one out on my own. As any old-school adventure gamer is aware, this led to trying out sometimes irrational behavior in-game to either stumble across a solution, or maybe gain some other clue as to what really should be done, or reveal some previously overlooked option that could break apart several roadblocks at once. As always, I saved the game, experimented, and often found myself having to re-load after experiencing a minor setback or disaster.

My brain was so engaged in this tiny, fictional, 16-color universe that this game "moment" occured in the real-real-world. After playing the game for a couple of hours earlier in the evening, I found myself in a conversation with my in-laws-to-be. I don't remember what it was about, but they asked me a question, and I found myself trying to "save game" prior to answering them. Just in case my answer wasn't a good one.

When I realized what I'd been thinking, I figured I'd probably had enough Neuromancer for the day. I figured my brain had been at it too long, anyway. And that was another thing about old-school adventure games: the solutions often revealed themselves only after you took a break from the game and let your subconscious wrestle with it for a bit.

Incidentally, whatever answer I gave to my wife's folks was evidently the correct dialog tree option. I didn't find myself needing to re-load the game afterwards.

Labels: Adventure Games, Game Moments, retro, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:46 PM (Permalink) 0 comments links to this post   

 
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