Articles

by Jeff Strand September 27, 2002

The Seriously Whacked Point of View "The Ultimate Adventure Game" by Jeff Strand

I was thinking about the lottery recently, because my wife insisted that we buy a ticket. We never play the lottery, but this particular week the jackpot was up to about $87 million, so it was crucial that we buy our chance at grand wealth for the rest of our lives.

Now, it's not at all uncommon for the lottery jackpot to be around $4 million. This, however, is apparently not worth the $1.00 for a ticket. No, it has to be $87 million to make up for the inconvenience of having to stop by the convenience store on the way to work.

While I don't want to get into the details of my personal income, suffice it to say that $4 million and $87 million fall into the exact same category: Impossibly Large Sums Of Money That I Won't Be Seeing Any Time In The Near Future. In any given week, my wife should be saying "Holy cow...the lottery's up to $4 million! Quick, we need a ticket!" But, like countless other people, we didn't buy a ticket until it hit $87 million.

Feeling very clever, I pointed out to my wife the ridiculous nature of this behavior. You'd think that if I were so darn clever, I'd be smart enough to know when to keep my mouth shut.

Anyway, this did make me think about possibly winning the lottery (I didn't) and what I'd do with the money. Maybe I'd create...the ultimate adventure game! I probably wouldn't, but for the purposes of this segue, let's say I would.

So, what would the ultimate adventure game be like? First of all, it would be a point-and-click adventure, even though everybody is saying that point-and-click adventures are dead, which is kinda silly. In the olden days, adventure games were played with a keyboard. This worked pretty well and people liked it. But then the "mouse" was invented, and players liked that even better because they could lean back in their chair and also have one hand free for housework. The mouse worked by moving the mouse pointer around the screen ("pointing") and occasionally pressing the button ("clicking"). That's how a mouse works. You point and click. Try it now!

It won't be long before the mouse is obsolete and we're all using voice recognition software to play our games ("Computer, complete Syberia for me!"). But some companies are proclaiming that the point-and-click adventure is dead, and they're proving it by releasing games played by using the...keyboard. This is sort of like proclaiming that automobiles are dead and trying to sell people horse-drawn carriages. Until the mouse is replaced by something even better, or they come up with a new way to use the mouse ("Play our new bounce-and-jiggle adventure!"), point-and-click is going to be the best way to play. So that's what my game would be.

Next, I'd design it without any sliding tile puzzles or mazes. Somewhere, sometime, on some lonely message board, there may have been an adventure game player who posted "I really enjoyed that game, but there weren't nearly enough sliding tile puzzles and mazes!" But it's safe to assume that the other people on the board immediately posted that he was a wiener. Adventure game players are generally adamantly against sliding tile puzzles and mazes, which really makes you wonder what designers are thinking when they put them in.

DESIGNER: Golly, how can I make this game more fun for the player?

ADVISOR: Put in a sliding tile puzzle! Players love those!

DESIGNER: Really?

ADVISOR: Yeah. Well, they either love them or they hate them. But it's definitely one of those. Ooh! Ooh! And put in one of those little plastic things where you have to tilt it around to get all of the metal balls into the holes at the same time! I love those!

Obviously, you wouldn't be able to die (well, your character wouldn't be able to die...you could do as you pleased) and you couldn't get irreversibly stuck, although those benefits are pretty much standard issue these days. And I'd hire this guy who e-mailed me a while ago to gleefully point out a couple of outrageously nitpicky errors in my novel Graverobbers Wanted (No Experience Necessary) to playtest the game to ensure that it went out bug-free.

I'd probably also have a part in the game where a lovable character tells the player that the trade paperback edition of Graverobbers Wanted (No Experience Necessary), minus those nitpicky errors, is now available from Hard Shell Word Factory for the embarrassingly low price of $10.95, which is about a fifth of what I'd charge for the ultimate adventure game. The book features demented games, crossbow mayhem, skull puppets, babysitting, and the occasional instance of graverobbing, and if you don't buy your very own copy right away you'll have a hollow feeling inside that won't go away for at least seven months.

(While I hate to give away all of my great ideas, any adventure game designers who wish to incorporate the brilliant concept from the previous paragraph into their own games are more than welcome.)

Okay, what else? I'd probably steal the in-game hint system from Torin's Passage, which gives you an hourglass timer and only allows you to access the incremental hints when enough time has elapsed. The problem with Torin's Passage is that you can cheat. So, like, you can start the game being all high and mighty and set it up so that you can only access a new hint every 60 minutes. But when you get stuck, you can go into the menu, change the option so that you can have hints whenever you want, get the answer you need, and then change it back to 60 minutes just as the attractive member of the opposite sex walks by, sort of like when you're at a gym doing pull-ups: "Two...three...four...sixty-seven...sixty-eight..." So my game would rip-off that hint system but make you pick a timeframe and stick to it.

So, what've we got so far? Point-and-click, no sliding tile puzzles or mazes, no dying, no inescapable situations, really picky guy playtesting the game, shameless promotion, and in-game hints. That's a start, I guess, but we're nowhere near the ultimate adventure game yet and my word count obligation ended in the last paragraph. Which means, ladies and gentlemen, that it's time for me to say:

To be continued...

Note: If you're the kind of weirdo who would buy a book like Graverobbers Wanted (No Experience Necessary), you need only to point-and-click on the following hyperlink:

http://www.hardshell.com/detail.asp?product_ID=0-7599-2736-7

Clicking on hyperlinks is great practice for building your adventure game skills. Click this one today!