Xmas theme for competition 7?

Started by Xerra, October 31, 2018, 17:11:00

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Derron

If you make a theme/restriction too "wide", then people end up doing more arcade games ("The adventure of Pac - the Man!").

Call it "text or Point-and-Click"-adventure to avoid the arcadesque games or "other genres".

Adventures need way more time than simple arcade games as in a good looking (click and point) adventure you need multiple scenes which need to get painted/rendered while in arcade games you can reuse much stuff/many elements.

Making an "adventureous" RPG would at least allow some kind of "tilebased game" (Zelda and the likes) but I assume this is not what the original request aimed for.


@ text based adventure
Nope, English isn't my mother tongue and this is true for some others among us too - we would create less "exciting to read" stuff.
Also I think it was another similar restriction than retro - if people like Matty enjoy to draw (or my person - to render) then we would be artificially limited in what we "can" just to make games more comparable. We could not improve our bad story telling with some nice GFX.


@ point and click adventure
To make stuff "doable in time" the game compo would require to have a limit of "screens". So tell a _short_ story, in up to 4 game screens/locations or so. That way the project might become swallowable/doable. It also requires to tell a precise little story.
Eg. "How Santa found his key" ... you only need Santas northpole fortress appartment (living room, bathroom, bedroom, cellar or so).
Also it allows to have a game which can be finished within <30 minutes. Means we can play all entries in a short amount of time.

Yes, it means we create more kind of "tech demo" games. But it also means: you can freely extend the game later on (if you really like to do it for more players than just the 2 hands of users here - which I do for now). It also means you do not need to create savegames and other "maybe hassles". It also limits the amount of ressources/assets you need to do. It saves amount of story you need to write (you can - of course - have some more dialogues, telling stuff, or even hide "details" in certain items on the screen which the protagonist has to "look at").


Nonetheless, as already written above: doing adventures is asset-intensive (except people force the game in the tileset-engine they already made before - so they could use some lowres stuff).


bye
Ron

Xerra

Quote from: BasicBoy on November 03, 2018, 03:35:49
Personally I'm not really into text adventures (only ever played one a bit - 'Sphinx Adventure' back in the 80s! [its author would go on to lead the design team for Acorn's first 32-bit OS]). Putting aside my artistic shortcomings, I wouldn't mind having a crack at a graphical adventure game/RPG. Maybe a fully 3D effort? Or would something along the lines of 'Citadel' or 'Palace Of Magic' on the old BBC Micro be permissible?

Holy crap, I remember the Sphinx adventure on the BBC model B. My mother and a lot of her friends used to play that every Friday evening for a few months back in the early 80's. I wasn't usually allowed to sit in as their language could be rather colorful while they were trying to crack it, but I did get to sit in a couple of times when I was on my best <cough> behaviour. Seem to remember a puzzle that had them stumped for weeks involving a bear standing in their way on a path which was eventually cracked by the simplest of solutions and hearing the lot of them yelling and cheering for ages about it.

An adventure doesn't appeal to everyone but, like Qube says, it's a pretty varied category and you have a lot of scope to take it into different directions. It doesn't have to be a text adventure - I'm just leaning to doing that myself. I do think it should have a Xmas/New year theme though - and be limited to a small amount of gameplay because we don't have much time to do it for the end of the year.
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Steve Elliott

#32
Nobody said an adventure game should be a text only adventure game!  I mentioned NA and the quality adventure games he's producing.  They have great graphics and humour and are far from a text only adventure.  Nothing against text adventures though, I grew up with them and your imagination fills in the gaps on each and every descriptive piece of text - like a novel.  Adventure is a great theme, the finer details just need to be worked out.
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Qube

We could have a 7 week comp ending before Christmas by a couple of days. The comp being simply "Create a Christmas themed adventure game." - Lots of scope in an adventure game.
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Until the next time.

RemiD

#34
i will participate only if there is enough days to finish something worth it, and if the genre (gameplay) of the game is not too restrictive...
for example, personally, i don't like point and click adventure games, with prerendered screens and manually made story / dialogues / enigmas...

but i like text adventure games similar to "you are the hero" gamebooks (like "lone wolf"), so why not...
see :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gamebooks
https://www.projectaon.org/en/Main/Books

Xerra

If we're going to run it then it will need to kick off soon. We only have six weeks until Xmas now as it is <shudder>
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STEVIE G

I'll probably give it a bash.   Grew up on Twin Kingdom Valley on the Beeb but text adventures don't appeal these days so I won't be going down that route.

A graphic adventure might be possible if it was a very short adventure.  ;D

Derron

Quote from: STEVIE G on November 04, 2018, 19:35:31
A graphic adventure might be possible if it was a very short adventure.  ;D

I would almost bet it would be an adVANture :-)


bye
Ron

STEVIE G

Quote from: Derron on November 04, 2018, 20:42:13
Quote from: STEVIE G on November 04, 2018, 19:35:31
A graphic adventure might be possible if it was a very short adventure.  ;D

I would almost bet it would be an adVANture :-)


bye
Ron

How much?  :P

I did consider making a Van-Tastic Trilogy - just not for this new comp.   ;D

RemiD

#39
what do you mean by "graphic adventure" game ? maniac mansion ? monkey island ?

Matty

Graphic Adventures I enjoyed as a kid:








RemiD

#41
i know a few games which are considered "adventure games" but are also considered rpg or action or plateform games... (neuromancer, dreamweb, final fantasy, tomb raider, rayman, zelda...)

so a better question would be : what would the gameplay consist in ? find an item and bring it to place to unlock a passage ? solve enigmas ? control the character with point and click ?

STEVIE G

Quote from: RemiD on November 04, 2018, 22:25:49
what do you mean by "graphic adventure" game ? maniac mansion ? monkey island ?

Yes.

Xerra

Quote from: STEVIE G on November 04, 2018, 21:10:11
I did consider making a Van-Tastic Trilogy - just not for this new comp.   ;D

No way! Unfair adVANtage. Referee!!!!!!
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