Thin on the Ground?

This thread over at the Adventure Gamers Forums caused me to think about why today's adventure games might not be attractive to 8-13 year olds (boys, mainly). Aside from the fact that very few of them have the pure fun element that older games like Monkey Island or Day of the Tentacle, most of today's adventures have a low Interaction Density.

Because older games had to make the most of limited floppy disc space, particularly on the Amiga, each location in an adventure was made to work hard for its keep. Each screen was filled with wonderful characters, objects to collect or interact with and hotspots to examine. Now, with the ability to cram ten times (or more) the number of locations onto a CD or DVD, even at very high resolution, the number of interactable items on each screen/location has reduced for the same amount of gameplay. The Interaction Density has decreased drastically, to the point in some places where there are strings of locations through which all the player character does is walk.

Game players of all ages don't simply want to wander around, particularly young kids with notoriously short attention spans, so when there is little to interact with, the natural conclusion to draw is that adventures are boring and not worth bothering with. Action games, in comparison, offer an almost constantly high Interaction Density and are always going to be a better draw to gamers who want to be always "doing stuff" in the games they play.

Clearly, the time has come to address this balance by thinking more creatively about the layout of adventures so that they offer the same level of Interaction Density they used to.

Ask the Developers

The newly re-designed Adventure Gamers site has a new regular feature called Ask the Developers. Bringing together a number of people from the world of adventure game development and posing serious questions, the guests then run with the subject, discussing it in an interesting manner. I hope you'll take a look.

And the award for best dialogue...

For those who don't know, The Inventory is a downloadable pdf magazine that concentrates on adventure games. The latest issue is a special devoted to it's own awards for 2004. It seems that they decided The Westerner was deserving of the award for best dialogue, based on the English language version of the game. As I script-edited this version, I like to think that I helped bring out the original intention of the creators over at Revistronic.

Busy weekend

I've not spent a great deal of time sitting at the computer this weekend, which may be a good thing - it's always good to take a break, however short it might be.

I spent most of the weekend fixing a fence in the garden, which had blown down in the storms we had a week earlier. As I have such a quiet lifestyle, the amount of physical work involved was much more than I bargained for, but with more winds forecast for later in the week, I knew I had to get it finished before they struck. As a result, my hands and arms hurt, my back aches and the back of my legs give me pain every time I bend to pick something up. However, there is something satisfying about exerting all that energy in such a physical way. It's almost like a purging of the system. The downside was that I managed to hit my fingers with the hammer on a number of occasions. :(

On Saturday we also had two lots of visitors, so I also had to spend some time with them in-between bouts of fence-fixing. I always enjoy having visitors, but the problem of the fence meant that I had to leave them for some of the time. Luckily they understood.

One thing that I did manage to fit in was a little bit of work on SC1. I wrote up some notes and initial dialogue for the ending. This is quite important as it now defines so much of the story progression in order to get the characters to that point. What I now intend to do is write up a story synopsis that brings it all together.

Serious money

Eurogamer news item.

There's always a bit of satisfaction knowing that justice has been seen to be served, particularly when it's infavour of the smaller party.

The End of the World

Watched a television programme last night called Horizon which covered the issue of global dimming. This is the reduction of sunlight reaching the Earth's surface due to polution in the atmosphere.

The really scary thing is that this effect is actually reducing the impact of global warming, but as the polution levels fall, due to new laws and regulations, the greenhouse gases will really come into their own and global warming will run away with itself.

It is predicted that if the governments of the world don't reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere immediately, Earth will be virtually uninhabitable within a hundred years.

So, knowing how useless governments are at pushing this kind of thing through, tell your children that the world they are inheriting from us is one that is doomed.

Flying Free

I have chosen to discontinue, for the time being, with an agency acting as my representatives.

Therefore, if anyone is looking to hire my services, can they please contact me directly.

Thanks.

Telltaled interview

There's a relatively new fansite dedicated to the company TellTale Games, even though they have yet to produce a finished game. However, the fansite, Telltaled, does have an interview with Dan Connors which is worth a little look.

SC1 progress

This has been coming together very well and I have a short demo up and running on my computer. It still needs a bit of work before I can start showing it around, but I'm really pleased with the way it's looking so far. I need to polish the dialogue and try to get a little more interaction going on. I also need to pull together a proposal document, which means tidying up the story, outlining the gameplay and working out a basic budget. I'm actually looking for quotes from 2D animators, so if you know of any, tell them to get in contact if you think they may be interested.

Interviewed

I've just finished an e-mail interview for a guy writing an article on game writing for the UK magazine, PC Zone. I may have rambled on a bit, so it will be interesting to see how much he uses. :)

More personal work

I've been spending a good deal of the last few days working on SC1. I have worked up the design of the first section in more detail, developed some of the characters and even written some initial dialogue. I've also been preparing some backgrounds so that I can establish a style. I've decided that the only way to give the game the feel that I want is to have the backgrounds done in a 2D painterly style, so my effort has been focused on this. I'm pretty pleased with the results and I've even been experimenting with putting it together in a proper game engine.

I'm still undecided how to proceed with this, but I'm going to give it some more time before making any decision. I shall post on here when I have a better idea.