Adventure Blog

Games That Tell Stories: Week 5 (The Book of Living Magic)

Sat, 11 May 2013 10:00:27 -0400

This is a bit of a weird one:

Like many adventure games (Monkey Island for example), you don’t play for the puzzles. Do the puzzles even have to be there?

We’ll revisit that question.

In the meantime, take a look at BLM (it’s free online) - it’s full of what can only be described as some hardcore crayon colored art and surreal and funny dialog. Play involves talking with many different strange characters and occasional inventory checking (but not much at all, compared to the classic adventure games).

Torment: Tides of Numenera: Brian Fargo Talks Torment and Reactivity

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 10:00:44 -0400

Torment: Tides of Numenera: Brian Fargo Talks Torment and Reactivity:

tormentrpg:

Brian Fargo talks to Games Radar about Kickstarter, the industry and how reactivity is at the core of both inXile’s projects.

Despite being very different games, Torment and Wasteland 2 share several unifying themes, the most significant of which is choice. “Player choice—or as we sometimes…

Games That Tell Stories: Week 4 (Monkey Island Series)

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 08:00:38 -0400

Welcome to Games That Tell Stories, where each (indefinite time period) we’ll take you through a new story-based game or adventure!

This week’s game is: Monkey Island!

With the recent demise of LucasArts, I thought it might be good to revisit one of the games that invented my childhood. My friends and I still use some of the sword fighting insults, and so should you.

While I’d love to go into why this game’s brilliant writing set a bar few games have ever cleared for me, I’d have to do a lot of writing myself to clear that bar, so for the moment I’ll just include some links to LucasArts/MI paraphernalia throughout the web:

Gamasutra does a feature: Why are We Still Talking about LucasArts’ Old Adventure Games?
Play the insult game online in your browser for free: http://www.int33h.com/test/mi/
The first days of LucasArts, its rise to prominence – and why it failed
Previously on Adventure Blog: Ron Gilbert talking about his new game, and his old one: http://adventurecow.tumblr.com/post/46263135363/ron-gilbert-talks-game-story-puzzle-design, http://adventurecow.tumblr.com/post/10766086772/writers-corner-the-creator-of-monkey-island-talks

[ this world ]: Connection

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 18:38:37 -0400

[ this world ]: Connection:

dbk2:

[ Connection ]

I’ve known her now, what, the last four or five years?
The technology, it’s improved leaps and bounds.

I mean, sometimes so rapidly, I wonder whether we know where or when we’ll stop racing forward with our phones and laptops raised to the skies.

I wonder.

And, yet, we’re…

Depression Quest

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 13:00:25 -0400

The list of all the Tumblr posts from people who played Depression Quest is amazing. Seeing how many people have been deeply affected by a simple bit of hypertext…

http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/depression-quest

Posting links to stories on Twitter

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 15:00:33 -0400

https://twitter.com/adventurecow

We’re posting links to stories through Twitter. Guys, social media is hard. April 2013 newsletter is coming!

Games That Tell Stories: Week 3 (Choose Your Own Adventure)

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 09:00:34 -0400

Welcome to Games That Tell Stories, where each week we’ll take you through a new story-based game or adventure!

This week’s game is: Your Code Name is Jonah, a Choose Your Own Adventure!

Sid Meier, the famed creator of the Civilization series, describes a game as “a series of interesting choices.” So what could be more interesting than a game made up of nothing but choices?

For its strengths, Your Code Name is Jonah is full of weaknesses. An excerpt from a review:

It’s a pretty ambitious book, and has some vivid spy encounters, but it shifts gears so many times, it’s impossible to remember what’s going on and what your mission is. Too many choices, too many characters, and too many merging plots make it fairly incomprehensible.

The amazing thing about Choose Your Own Adventures is that they can still be engaging. We play video games today where can watch lightning fly from our fingertips. Games where every kind of magic we can think of is real. Games where we can fight hundreds of zombies. At the same time.

What makes a game interesting when the only degree of freedom you have is to pick from a menu of two (or sometimes three) choices? Some theories

1. Mostly writing

If you’re reading a story, you don’t have to be stuck with whatever the artists decided the words should look like. Sometimes, what you don’t see is as interesting as what you do see. This is especially true in some genres (horror comes to mind).

2. Choices that feel significant

Most video games have a pretty limited space of possibilities. You can choose to be evil, or choose to be good, but you’re usually stuck along a path chosen in advance. CYOA books tend to go wild with their paths - you can end up on the moon and travelling through time to an Aztec temple in the same story.

3. A puzzle to fill in the blanks

Some CYOA games are actually a puzzle. You go through the story several times and die, but each time, you find clues about how the world works, and start to piece together how to find the solution.

Anyone who’s read CYOA out there: What do you think makes a good Choose Your Own Adventure?

Silly CYOA below...

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 15:00:51 -0400

Silly CYOA below flowchart:

http://www.fastcompany.com/1628679/choose-your-own-adventure-gizmodo-jason-chen-iphone-seize-search-police-raid

A short documentary on story telling in video games. (Found this...

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 02:00:10 -0400

A short documentary on story telling in video games. (Found this via RPS.)

Interactive Fiction: The Art of Video Game Storytelling

Today’s top video game designers explore the past, present and future of interactive fiction and adventure gaming. Watch as storytelling’s biggest names chart virtual narrative and scriptwriting’s evolution from the days of point-and-click adventures to today’s sprawling online, downloadable and massively multiplayer online (MMO) games. A must-see for adventure game fans, courtesy of Game Theory with Scott Steinberg.

Ron Gilbert talks game, story, puzzle design

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 13:50:02 -0400

Ron Gilbert talks game, story, puzzle design:

Ron Gilbert (of Monkey Island and Double Fine fame) talks about the design process for his new platforming adventure game, The Cave.

Each of our design weeks would focus on one area of the game.  The first day was just to talk about overarching ideas, the character’s backstory, the purpose of the area and what the main goal of the player/character was.  During that first day we’d just throw out wild ideas and see what stuck.

The next day we’d take all those crazy ideas and try to arrive on the core puzzles.  We’d also start to sketch out what the area looked like and where the puzzles might go.

On the third day we’d look at what we had and make refinements.  It was common to have most everything figure out by the end of the second day, with just one or two issues remaining.  On day three we’d resolve those and have a day four if needed.  We tried to design for only three days a week to let our minds rest (as well as get everything else done that needed doing).

"We should be able to imagine how, from their perspective, they see themselves as the protagonist."

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 17:27:28 -0400

"We should be able to imagine how, from their perspective, they see themselves as the protagonist.":

A shiny quote from Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw, creator of Zero Punctuation, on creating believable enemies in a game.

Roundtable: The Interactive Fiction Renaissance

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 14:16:54 -0400

Roundtable: The Interactive Fiction Renaissance:

Text games have come a long way from Zork. Thanks to new tools, new authors, and ubiquitous mobile devices enabling new players, the interactive fiction genre is enjoying a revival of sorts.

Game Developer spoke with Inklewriter dev Jon Ingold, longtime author Andrew Plotkin, indie dev and advocate Anna Anthropy, Failbetter Games CEO Alexis Kennedy, and interactive-fiction pioneer Emily Short about how (and why) the IF scene is expanding.

Some more photos from the NYC Games Forum and Games.com...

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 19:29:27 -0400

Some more photos from the NYC Games Forum and Games.com Hackathon! 6 hours fly by in a well lit, well pizza-ed room. #GDotHack

Pictures from the NYC Games Forum and Games.com Hackathon going...

Sat, 09 Mar 2013 18:15:42 -0500

Pictures from the NYC Games Forum and Games.com Hackathon going on right now! #GDotHack

Read our new story - Eye of the Beholder

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 12:57:00 -0500

Read our new story - Eye of the Beholder:

Currently just a short pilot - more to come!

Limbo, or the limits of language

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 09:44:38 -0400

Limbo, or the limits of language:

Over the years, scrolling intros and in-game dialogue bubbles have given way to voiced-over cinematics and branching dialogue streams. However, words continue to feel detached from the games they inhabit. Words, solicited to fill the narrative blanks, feel forced upon us. This is because no matter how sharp the writing is, or how seamlessly it seems to fit the game, a game’s real story is never the one written by the writer; a game’s real story is the one being told through the experience of playing and surmounting the game’s challenges. Writing well isn’t the greatest task of a video game writer: it’s knowing how to chisel the words and attaining ideal and innovative ways of spreading them across the pages of the game.

Planescape: Torment and the days of games as novels

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 16:46:00 -0400

Planescape: Torment and the days of games as novels:

Avellone is quoted as saying that many of the themes presented in the game “could only have been communicated through text.” Text is cheap. Text doesn’t eat into a special effects budget, doesn’t demand more animations or more voicework. But text can portray ideas just as fully, unless you feel like arguing that literature is a dying art form.

Text-only storytelling opportunities must be seen as golden by game writers nowadays, a chance to write independent of cinematic concerns or total poly-counts rendered or the fees for the voice actors. For an example, there are the emails in Deus Ex or Mass Effect and to a lesser extent, the recycled invented languages played over different subtitles in Knights of the Old Republic and Jade Empire. And, of course, virtually all of Torment.

Via Medium Difficulty

What are the most treasured aspects of '90s adventure game design and how might these be modernized and used in modern games?

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 16:58:05 -0400

A great little essay on the great aspects of classic adventure games: http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-most-treasured-aspects-of-90s-adventure-game-design-and-how-might-these-be-modernized-and-used-in-modern-games

Dragon Age writer reads 400 pieces of Dragon Age fanfiction and offers advice on writing

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 20:18:00 -0500

Dragon Age writer reads 400 pieces of Dragon Age fanfiction and offers advice on writing:

Courtesy of RPS, which also provided fun snarky responses.

The winner of the Windhammer competition, on writing a gamebook

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 14:55:56 -0500

The winner of the Windhammer competition, on writing a gamebook