Fundamentals of Adventure Game Design

Highlights

Many adventure game purists don’t care for action-adventures; generally, they dislike any sort of physical challenge or time pressure. If you plan to make your game an action-adventure, you should be aware that, although your design might appeal to some action gamers who might not otherwise buy your game, you might also discourage some adventure gamers who would. Without doubt, however, action-adventure hybrids are now more popular than traditional adventure games. At first glance, the lack of replayability seems the greatest disadvantage of adventure games. Most adventure games consist of a sequence of puzzles, each of which has a single solution; when you know the solution, there’s not much challenge in playing it again. An adventure game that requires 40 hours to finish the first time might take only 4 hours the second time.

At first glance, the lack of replayability seems the greatest disadvantage of adventure games. Most adventure games consist of a sequence of puzzles, each of which has a single solution; when you know the solution, there’s not much challenge in playing it again. An adventure game that requires 40 hours to finish the first time might take only 4 hours the second time.

To ameliorate this problem, consider making puzzle sequences or challenges that allow the player a choice of solutions. The consequences of the player’s choices can affect not only the game she is playing but also the story itself. The player who chooses to blow up the gate blocking her way might accidentally hurt someone in the process and be chased out of town. The player who needs a specific key might have to steal it and be chased because she’s a thief. Offering alternative solutions adds to the replayability of the game. Adventure game puzzle design and challenges are discussed later in this e-book.

In practice, however, replayability isn’t much of a problem. Research shows that a great many players never finish these games at all;

dave Because much of the entertainment of an adventure game comes from seeing the avatar explore the world and interact with other characters, the first-person perspective doesn’t offer as many opportunities for visual drama as other perspectives do. As adventure games became larger and began to include a more detailed story, designers started to break them into chapters (see Figure 6). The player could wander around all he liked in the area devoted to a given chapter, but when he moved on to the next chapter, the story advanced and there was no way back In a foldback story, the player has some dramatic freedom, but eventually his options narrow to a single inevitable event before they branch out again. In adventure games, this inevitable event is normally the transition to the next chapter Show, don’t tell. Set the mood and amplify the tension in your story using music, well-chosen color palettes, camera angles, lighting, and architecture. Never say that something is scary, make it scary. Puzzles present small, individual problems. Your story needs a larger problem that underpins the whole story—something that, even if it isn’t revealed to the player at the beginning of the game, is the reason that there is a story. You can imagine adventure games structured along other lines but will find few on the market that don’t adhere to the heroic quest scenario. It’s possible to write an adventure game that is chiefly about the personalities of the characters (as in Jane Austen’s novels, for example), but they are not the norm. Occasionally exceptions to this structure arise, such as in stories in which the hero is abducted at the beginning, escapes, and must return to his home. However, in these stories, the protagonist’s struggles don’t get easier and easier until he just strolls in happily. He often returns home to find that things have changed for the worse and must be corrected, or that he must leave again to hunt down his abductor. Nowadays, most adventure games adopt a “fair warning” approach, making it clear when an object or action threatens danger and (usually) offering a way of neutralizing or circumventing that danger. If you put a dragon in a cave, it’s a nice touch to litter the entrance with the bones of earlier adventurers. Understanding personal relationships. The challenges of understanding and perhaps influencing the relationships between people make up a little-explored aspect of adventure game design. Most adventure games limit characters to very simple, mechanical states of mind. If we devote a little more effort, people, rather than objects, could become the primary subject of adventure games, and this would make the it’s still a good idea to give the player a map. A few games deliberately deny the player a map to make the game more difficult, but this is poor design. There’s not a lot of fun in being lost. If you force the player to make his own map, he has to constantly look away from the screen to a sketchpad at his side; that’s a tedious business that rapidly destroys suspension of disbelief. Automapping destroys the challenge imposed by mazes, but mazes are one of the most overused and least-enjoyed features of adventure games. the journal gives you an opportunity to define the avatar’s character through his use of language. Journals are ideal for games in which the player must collect informational clues, such as mysteries in the Nancy Drew series. The point-and-click interface is an indirect control mechanism and was for many years the de facto standard for adventure games. It makes the player feel as if the avatar is a person separate from himself rather than a puppet whose every movement is directly controlled, and this contributes to the depth of the character dave First the player clicks, then the avatar walks—if she can; if she can’t, she will usually say so aloud. It works well in traditional adventure games with no action challenges. However, because traditional adventures are increasingly rare and action-adventure hybrids have become more common, the point-and-click interface is gradually being replaced by direct control interfaces. If the game requires the player to move repeatedly through areas he already knows well, the player may find watching the avatar walk deliberately from place to place boring. On the other hand, if you offer a rich, detailed world and your game expects the player to examine everything closely for clues, the user interface must make slow and accurate movement possible. Dynamically highlighted objects. The active objects in a scene normally look like part of the background but appear highlighted when the mouse cursor passes over them. You can, for example, change the shape of the mouse cursor, have the object light up, or have the object’s name appear momentarily. It still requires the player to do some hunting, but hunting is much easier than hunting and clicking; a quick wave of the cursor tells the player if there’s an active object nearby. Avatar-focused highlighting. This mechanism is typically used with handheld controllers when the player doesn’t have a cursor. As the avatar moves around, active objects that he comes near to are highlighted. When he moves away, this highlighting disappears. A related form is focus-of-attention highlighting, in which the avatar must face the object, as if paying attention to it. A number of games use a menu to allow the player to select which action to take and which object to manipulate. This gives the player a clear picture of available choices, but the presence of the menu does harm the player’s sense of immersion somewhat. Locating the menu outside the main view of the scene will help with this somewhat, or you can use pop-up menus that appear only when needed (see Figure 8). The player clicks one of the items to perform the desired action. This mechanism in effect shows the player all the available verbs that can be used at a particular time and lets him choose one