It's now been six months since I've released my first adventure game. Now that the development effort is over, I've spent some time considering, "What next?", and, even more importantly, "What would make it better?". Ron Gilbert, creator of Monkey Island, famously wrote the article, "Why Adventure Games Suck." It's an excellent read. Believe it or not, this article heavily affected the design of Tick's Tales, and I'm happy for it. However, I spent so much time emphasizing what not to do -- dead ends, death, mind-bending logic. I wish I spent as much time thinking about what to do. And that is the subject of this research.
Integrating Narrative into Game Design: A Portal Post-Mortem
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild review
Link’s latest adventure is a bold and much-needed reinvention of the beloved franchise
» Myst (or, The Drawbacks to Success) The Digital Antiquarian
Robyn Miller, one half of the pair of brothers who created the adventure game known as Myst with their small studio Cyan, tells a story about its development that’s irresistible to a writer like me. When the game was nearly finished, he says, its publisher Brøderbund insisted that it be put through “focus-group testing” at their offices. Robyn and his brother Rand reluctantly agreed, and soon the first group of guinea pigs shuffled into Brøderbund’s conference room. Much to its creators’ dismay, they hated the game. But then, just as the Miller brothers were wondering whether they had wasted the past two years of their lives making it, the second group came in. Their reaction was the exact opposite: they loved the game.
The Entire History of Paradox Interactive, I Guess
» The Curse of Monkey Island The Digital Antiquarian
Fair Warning: this article contains plot spoilers for Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge and The Curse of Monkey Island. No puzzle spoilers, however…
» The 14 Deadly Sins of Graphic-Adventure Design (or, Why Ron Gilbert Hated Adventure Games) The Digital Antiquarian
In addition to the obvious goals of making a hit game and not getting himself fired, one of Ron Gilbert’s implicit goals in making Maniac Mansion was to force a dialog about the sorry state of the nascent art of graphic-adventure design. Sadly, his message wouldn’t be terribly well-heeded by designers other than his own colleagues at Lucasfilm Games for quite some time. Indeed, I have a theory that there have been far more really bad adventure games created than bad examples of any other gaming genre over the years since Gilbert first tried to set the world on a better path. If that is indeed the case, the causes come largely down to two factors.
Moving Forward from Hot Fable Summer
Suggestions on how to move forward on the craziest 90 days in cyber and AI history.
If You’ve Only Ever Played D&D, You’re Missing Out - Aaron Ross Powell
Tabletop RPGs are story engines. Why would you want to tell only one kind of story?
» The Last Adventures of Legend The Digital Antiquarian
The early days were the best. We had successes, we had fun, and we had a good business model. As the industry changed, everything became more complicated and harder.
The Rise and Fall of the Lone Game Developer – Holy Ghost Stories
In the early 80s, all it took to make a game was a computer, some graph paper, and a lot of determination.
cataclysm: The zombie apocalypse starts now
I love it when people suggest console games for Linux are a joke. I can think of three or four games offhand — crawl is one, taipan and gearhead are others — with more depth and intelli…
Artificial adventures
I've been playing around with AI. Nothing I'm doing is particularly exciting, but the internet tends to only surface the most extreme opinions in either direction and I found it useful to hear from friends who have opinions that aren't optimized for click-through rate.
» Choose Your Own Adventure The Digital Antiquarian
The first and most iconic of all the Choose Your Own Adventure books involved spelunking, just as did the first and most iconic of all computer-based adventure games.
Undertale, one year later - Kill Screen - Previously
September 15th marks a full year since the arrival of Undertale, Toby Fox’s 16 bit-style role-playing game for PC. Its auspicious reception, which even delivered the game into the Pope’s hands, seems now more than ever to have been a flashpoint in current debates as to what constitutes excellence in
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