Make Your Own Point And Click Adventures

Thanks to Jakob for pointing to a Boomtown.net article discussing independent developers keeping point and click adventures alive on the PC. The article is headed "..most of us remember with fondness the Monkey Island era of point and clicks, but now fans of the genre are making their own", and has links to a number of fan/indie-developed games such as Pleurghburg: Dark Ages or the in-development Project Joe, plus free adventure game engines such as Adventure Game Studio and AGAST.

Comments

Of course this game genre is near extinction.

[Dolemite_the_Wiz]

I crave the unpredictability of a human opponent over the internet as I will never play the same game twice.

I can play games like this once and that's it.

What more can you do with linear games such as the ones described in this story.

Dolemite
____________________

Re:Of course this game genre is near extinction.

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you say the same thing about books as well? That's how I look at adventure games: They are interactive books.

Re:Of course this game genre is near extinction.

[Shishio]

The "unpredictability of a human opponent" is great in games like first-person shooters, where direct competition is an integral part of the game's interest. For me, those games are more interesting as they become more challenging.

Adventures and RPG's, however, have a much different place in my game collection. Some of the point and click adventures, as mentioned here, can be very static, but many others have plenty of replay value. RPG's, particularly ones released for the consoles such as the SNES and PSX, have different approaches and different options that can be taken. Even some of the very linear ones like Earthbound can be enjoyed plenty of times.

I agree that those discussed in this story could use more to them. But the general need for a human opponent for a game to be unpredictable or have replay value is unfair to a great deal of classic games.

In a way, it (online human-interactive adventuring) makes the games more predictable. Most of the veterans or strong players of the online games now become that way by their ability to sacrifice more time and money to the game. The casual players receive much less out of a game than they normally would. This is fine in a FPS, where skills generally carry over and where there is usually a new game every so often to level the playing field.

Human interaction makes for a nice adventure, but so does a strong story. I'm sorry for the long rant, I hope it makes sense when I submit it. :)

Who does the art?

[dwvanstone]

I find the idea of generating a text adventure (using TADS or Inform) to be very appealing. I love adventures, text or graphical, and I could come up with many clever puzzles or story lines.

However, I could never come up with the art needed for the graphical adventure.

I think it's a rare person who has the talents of putting together a good story, good puzzles, and good artwork in order to use these tools.

Like these guys

[barryfandango]

http://www.reldni.com

high quality freeware games with a razor sharp wit... like Oscar Wilde meets King's Quest.

The preceding paragraph was a complete lie.

Plug, plug, plug - Loki!

[McMac]

Hey, they're missing Project Loki - check it out at:

www.sorsegods.co.uk

We've been working on it (very part time) for bloody ages and we're finally coming to the point where the engine is working well and the graphics are coming together too!

Hooray for us.