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- Messages
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I spent a few minutes trying to think of an uglier video game protagonist.
Poor Stubbs was the best I could think of:
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The Random Adventure Game News Thread
- Thread starter Jaesun
- Start date
I spent a few minutes trying to think of an uglier video game protagonist.
Poor Stubbs was the best I could think of:
V_K
Arcane
They both have nothing on Dropsy though.
I spent a few minutes trying to think of an uglier video game protagonist.
Poor Stubbs was the best I could think of:
I mean, this is the staff of nightmares.
LESS T_T
Arcane
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- Oct 5, 2012
- Messages
- 13,582
"LEAVES - The Journey" is an artistic exploration and puzzle-adventure full of real sculptures in a surreal dreamscape.
Collect and combine information and solve a huge variety of challenging puzzles and mini games.
Your sudden arrival on the high plateau of the Stony Mountains caused quite the commotion among the Treefruities. They even forget holding on to the leaves of their home tree and so the calamity ensues. A gust of wind scatters the leaves all across the lands of Mononino.
Help the Treefruities to get their lost leaves back and look forward to an amazing journey. Explore the fantastic land of Mononino where strange creatures and secrets are waiting to be discovered.
- Artistic puzzle design in the tradition of games like Samorost, Machinarium und Rhem
- Challenging puzzles and unique mini games
- Explore four vast worlds
- Atmospheric soundtrack by award winning composer Gary Marlowe and Daniel Hoffknecht
edit: also sequel:
Last edited:
hello friend
Arcane
Looks like something Fly Amanita would make
MRY
Wormwood Studios
Various WEG games are discounted on GOG -- $2 for Primordia, $4.50 for Shardlight, $3 for Technobabylon etc.
Now I have to buy it. Namedropping Rhem just can't go unrewarded.
(Also lol at the German "und" instead of "and".)
Hellion
Arcane
- Joined
- Feb 5, 2013
- Messages
- 1,690
Syberia II "on the house" on Origin for a limited time.
https://www.origin.com/irl/en-us/store/syberia/syberia-2/standard-edition
https://www.origin.com/irl/en-us/store/syberia/syberia-2/standard-edition
hello friend
Arcane
lol origin
They keep giving out free games but it's never even a little tempting
They keep giving out free games but it's never even a little tempting
MRY
Wormwood Studios
Not sure if this is this the right thread, but I had a fun time chatting with Dan Felder about setting design: http://danfelder.libsyn.com/ He's mostly a P&P RPG guy, but we talked a fair bit about Primordia.
vortex
Fabulous Optimist
MRY
Wormwood Studios
Can you remind me what I said about it? It's been a while since I did the interview.
MRY
Wormwood Studios
Ah, I just found it right as you posted that.
So that point was part of my large view about the "verbs" of a computer game.
- You begin with the gameplay verbs and then ask, "What kind of character would naturally do those verbs?" In an adventure games, the verbs are typically: (1) wander; (2) search; (3) take/steal; (4) combine/tinker; (5) help people with their chores; and (6) ask people about how to do things. Sometimes you have other verbs like "shoot gun" or "cast magic spell," but they're less common, both in the sense that they are less common among games and less common even within games that offer those verbs. In Rise of the Dragon, for example, you will "wander" and "search" and "take" much more than you will "shoot."
- You then say, "In what kind of story would this kind of character be the focal point of the action?" Put otherwise, in what kind of story would these verbs drive the action? For example, imagine trying to adapt Predator to an adventure game using these verbs. It could be done. But the result would be a terrible distortion of the Predator story. Such a distortion took place in the Nintendo adaption of Predator to a Contra clone because "jump along platforms" and "kill enemies" is actually not really what the Predator story is about. If you made an adventure game out of Predator, too much emphasis would be applied to things like the tree-trunk trap or smearing yourself with mud. It couldn't be done well. (By contrast, you could probably adapt the basic concept of Apollo 13 or Gravity pretty well.) This is why, incidentally, the Tell Tale adaptations don't wind up real adventure games -- they need the QTE segments so that they have the verbs to tell the stories because you can't tell the stories they're adapting with adventure game verbs.
- Next, you say, "In what kind of world would such a story be fun, coherent, and rewarding for the player?" Put otherwise, where can you tell a story about a character picking up stuff and putting it together in which that story matters. There are settings in which stories about an investigative reporter, a policeman, a handyman, a scavenger, or a rogue can be incredibly effective. But there are also settings in they are less effective. For example, a story about a handyman in the trenches of WWI requires a particularly deft touch that a story about a handyman on a crashed spaceship doesn't because the setting doesn't support the character as well. WWI promotes a certain set of themes that don't really work with the mechanics of "problems are overcome by an individual fitting pieces together."
This is all a huge lead up to your question, but it helps me answer it.
My problem with TLJ is that it screws up each of these three steps.
April Ryan is an 18-year-old art student, a character that should have a certain set of skills (of limited practical value, to be honest, but at least she's not a political philosophy student like I was). The "verbs" of an art major are totally absent in the "verbs" of the game. Indeed, many of the "verbs" of the story are idiosyncratically contrary to an art student (e.g., using a calculator to defeat a wizard, being able to understand alien languages, knowing old movies).
Next, the verbs of the game (standard adventure game verbs) are not actually the verbs that drive the story. The key events of the story are things like fighting an enemy that are ill-suited to adventure game verbs. The result is that the actual steps you take are silly and inconsistent with the actions.
Ultimately, the problem is that the setting itself calls for a particular kind of story -- an exploratory fish-out-of-water story where the character is lost in an alien world's social norms and magical phenomena but then discovers that the skills from her own world make her exceptionally powerful. This is the story that TLJ is robbing, of course, told by Piers Anthony in the seven-book Apprentice Adept series or, to some degree, by Terry Brooks in the five-book Magic Kingdom of Landover series. These settings can produce (relatively) interesting stories, but the stories that they produce aren't about people picking up random crap and using it in unpredictable ways.
TLJ might have made an okay imitation of the Apprentice Adept series if it were a graphic novel because then the story could have focused on the specific attributes of an art major in the role of Shifter. But once the story had to be told through the medium of an adventure game and the generic verbs of that medium, the story became distorted and ridiculous. You see this in terms of the puzzles but also in terms of the way that so much has to be done through (1) other characters' actions, (2) dialogue, and (3) cutscenes rather than April Ryan's in-game actions. (It's even worse in Dreamfall, and that's one reason they need all the minigames.)
If you look at Full Throttle, by contrast, they realized it couldn't be told with standard adventure game verbs. They found verbs that fit the character, a story whose muscle was those verbs, and a setting where that story made sense. One reason the Warcraft Adventures adventure game has always seemed so mediocre to me is that it takes a setting created to host a mostly anonymous war story and try to have it host an adventure game story. They take a stock character whose verbs should be things like "rend" and "kill" and "roar" and give him the same verbs as Larry Laffer.
When you have this kind of problem, you end up with a story that comes across like a delirious child because the plot needs to go from A to E but the steps you have to get it there are not B, C, and D but 7, circle, and malaise. So you end up with nonsense like the rubbery ducky puzzle, or the slapstick sequence where a monster chases you around a platform but can't push you off or hurt you in any way. In my experience, this is not unlike how kids tell stories because they often start with a story from something else that they wanted to steal (a fable or Star Wars movie or whatever) and then populate it with the stuff that's at their fingertips.
Anyway, bear in mind it's been a long time since I played these games, and I'm a hater, so maybe I'm all wrong.
So that point was part of my large view about the "verbs" of a computer game.
- You begin with the gameplay verbs and then ask, "What kind of character would naturally do those verbs?" In an adventure games, the verbs are typically: (1) wander; (2) search; (3) take/steal; (4) combine/tinker; (5) help people with their chores; and (6) ask people about how to do things. Sometimes you have other verbs like "shoot gun" or "cast magic spell," but they're less common, both in the sense that they are less common among games and less common even within games that offer those verbs. In Rise of the Dragon, for example, you will "wander" and "search" and "take" much more than you will "shoot."
- You then say, "In what kind of story would this kind of character be the focal point of the action?" Put otherwise, in what kind of story would these verbs drive the action? For example, imagine trying to adapt Predator to an adventure game using these verbs. It could be done. But the result would be a terrible distortion of the Predator story. Such a distortion took place in the Nintendo adaption of Predator to a Contra clone because "jump along platforms" and "kill enemies" is actually not really what the Predator story is about. If you made an adventure game out of Predator, too much emphasis would be applied to things like the tree-trunk trap or smearing yourself with mud. It couldn't be done well. (By contrast, you could probably adapt the basic concept of Apollo 13 or Gravity pretty well.) This is why, incidentally, the Tell Tale adaptations don't wind up real adventure games -- they need the QTE segments so that they have the verbs to tell the stories because you can't tell the stories they're adapting with adventure game verbs.
- Next, you say, "In what kind of world would such a story be fun, coherent, and rewarding for the player?" Put otherwise, where can you tell a story about a character picking up stuff and putting it together in which that story matters. There are settings in which stories about an investigative reporter, a policeman, a handyman, a scavenger, or a rogue can be incredibly effective. But there are also settings in they are less effective. For example, a story about a handyman in the trenches of WWI requires a particularly deft touch that a story about a handyman on a crashed spaceship doesn't because the setting doesn't support the character as well. WWI promotes a certain set of themes that don't really work with the mechanics of "problems are overcome by an individual fitting pieces together."
This is all a huge lead up to your question, but it helps me answer it.
My problem with TLJ is that it screws up each of these three steps.
April Ryan is an 18-year-old art student, a character that should have a certain set of skills (of limited practical value, to be honest, but at least she's not a political philosophy student like I was). The "verbs" of an art major are totally absent in the "verbs" of the game. Indeed, many of the "verbs" of the story are idiosyncratically contrary to an art student (e.g., using a calculator to defeat a wizard, being able to understand alien languages, knowing old movies).
Next, the verbs of the game (standard adventure game verbs) are not actually the verbs that drive the story. The key events of the story are things like fighting an enemy that are ill-suited to adventure game verbs. The result is that the actual steps you take are silly and inconsistent with the actions.
Ultimately, the problem is that the setting itself calls for a particular kind of story -- an exploratory fish-out-of-water story where the character is lost in an alien world's social norms and magical phenomena but then discovers that the skills from her own world make her exceptionally powerful. This is the story that TLJ is robbing, of course, told by Piers Anthony in the seven-book Apprentice Adept series or, to some degree, by Terry Brooks in the five-book Magic Kingdom of Landover series. These settings can produce (relatively) interesting stories, but the stories that they produce aren't about people picking up random crap and using it in unpredictable ways.
TLJ might have made an okay imitation of the Apprentice Adept series if it were a graphic novel because then the story could have focused on the specific attributes of an art major in the role of Shifter. But once the story had to be told through the medium of an adventure game and the generic verbs of that medium, the story became distorted and ridiculous. You see this in terms of the puzzles but also in terms of the way that so much has to be done through (1) other characters' actions, (2) dialogue, and (3) cutscenes rather than April Ryan's in-game actions. (It's even worse in Dreamfall, and that's one reason they need all the minigames.)
If you look at Full Throttle, by contrast, they realized it couldn't be told with standard adventure game verbs. They found verbs that fit the character, a story whose muscle was those verbs, and a setting where that story made sense. One reason the Warcraft Adventures adventure game has always seemed so mediocre to me is that it takes a setting created to host a mostly anonymous war story and try to have it host an adventure game story. They take a stock character whose verbs should be things like "rend" and "kill" and "roar" and give him the same verbs as Larry Laffer.
When you have this kind of problem, you end up with a story that comes across like a delirious child because the plot needs to go from A to E but the steps you have to get it there are not B, C, and D but 7, circle, and malaise. So you end up with nonsense like the rubbery ducky puzzle, or the slapstick sequence where a monster chases you around a platform but can't push you off or hurt you in any way. In my experience, this is not unlike how kids tell stories because they often start with a story from something else that they wanted to steal (a fable or Star Wars movie or whatever) and then populate it with the stuff that's at their fingertips.
Anyway, bear in mind it's been a long time since I played these games, and I'm a hater, so maybe I'm all wrong.
V_K
Arcane
MRY
Wormwood Studios
Well, I think those are the starting place verbs for all of the Golden Age adventure games, whether we're talking Lucas, Sierra, Westwood, or Revolution. You're right that there is some variation from them in certain games. I'm not opposed to varying, but it's typically not what games do, and it requires a fair amount to add such variation and to do it right. If you want to tell a story that is principally about sneaking and shooting, I think you're better off starting from a different genre than you are starting with a point-and-click adventure and adding/removing features.
There's something to be said about action being out of place in adventure games.
It maps to cerebral logic (sleuth, mechanical puzzles) or toon logic much much better.
It maps to cerebral logic (sleuth, mechanical puzzles) or toon logic much much better.
MRY
Wormwood Studios
PC Gamer did an article about selling adventure games: http://www.pcgamer.com/the-tricky-business-of-making-modern-adventure-games/ I found it kind of weird and disjointed, but it does have some tidbits in it.
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Why? They continue to be very profitable in what they are doing.
Chateaubryan
Cipher
- Joined
- Nov 28, 2008
- Messages
- 369
The trailer for Paradigm is up <3.
LESS T_T
Arcane
- Joined
- Oct 5, 2012
- Messages
- 13,582
http://www.lifelessmoon.com/
Revealed: The Next Game from the Creators of Lifeless Planet
This is an exciting day for fans of Lifeless Planet and science fiction. Be one of the first to see the announce trailer for our next indie adventure! We're still early in development, but we couldn't wait to share what we're working on. Play the video above, check out these screenshots below, learn more about the game, sign up for updates, and watch this site for future announcements.
So uh.... how was Lifeless Planet? Never heard of it till now... 
Poor man Dear Esther done in Unity. Metascore 59, user rating 6.7.So uh.... how was Lifeless Planet? Never heard of it till now...
looks awesome
vortex
Fabulous Optimist
While we're at it, Shadowgate 2 -> when ?
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