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Classic Games (Games) Entertainment Games

Make Your Own Point And Click Adventures 24

Posted by simoniker from the scumm-of-the-earth dept.
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.
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Make Your Own Point And Click Adventures More

Make Your Own Point And Click Adventures

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  • Of course this game genre is near extinction. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Dolemite_the_Wiz ( 618862 ) on Wednesday June 18, 2003 @09:47AM (#6233338) Journal
    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
    ____________________
    • Like I've done with The Longest Journey [longestjourney.com]:

      • Buy it for a friend, then wait with anticipation as they get to the good parts
      • Wish there were other adventure games that good
      • Reminisce
      • Share your favorite elements with other friends who've played the game

      Good adventure games like this can not be replayed, but they can be remembered with fondness.

    • Re:Of course this game genre is near extinction. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 18, 2003 @10:13AM (#6233642)
      Do you say the same thing about books as well? That's how I look at adventure games: They are interactive books.
    • I wish I could disagree with you, but I am starting to feel the same way with all video games.

      I want to praise RPGS, and their singular style, but more and more I find myself not finishing games.
    • ill agree, but I really do want to drag my 'under a killing moon' game out of the bottom of the pile of games. They do have replayability if they are fun and have a good story, you just have to wait a couple of years. :-)
    • I don't believe these games are necessarily dying out just because there are multiplayer games out there. They are dying out because they are a bit expensive to produce versus the number of units it will likely sell. The big publishers are not satisfied with 100k units sold for a title anymore, so who knows when we'll see another King's Quest series.

      In terms of why would anyone want to play this kind of game, I view these games as a story or a world to be discovered. I also don't necessarily want to play
    • 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 PS
    • What more can you do with linear games such as the ones described in this story.

      Who says one player games are linear?
      Look at something like Deus Ex.

      By placing multiple solutions to every puzzle, and affects that it makes to future stories, you can make a VERY complex and replayable game.

      It just needs effort and desire poured into it.

  • Who does the art? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dwvanstone ( 581420 ) on Wednesday June 18, 2003 @10:01AM (#6233501)
    I find the idea of generating a text adventure (using TADS [teladesign.com] or Inform [inform-fiction.org]) 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.

    • I am a member of the AGS community, and have created a few point and click adventures, using these sorts of programs. Many have this problem There are ways around it. You can have other people draw your art, or just use mspaint, and make a really funny game. A few of the independant classics have had pretty crappy graphics actually
    • If you are happy with icon art, rather than realistic or cartoon, it's pretty easy. For example, a program like 'stickers' lets anyone simply place a scene, e.g. their farm set has a barn, chickens, etc. So you put that down as your background, choose which items are icons that, when clicked, do something. Set exit points, barriers. Come up with a story, and enable the proper icons (i.e. Q&A, widget hunting, clues, etc).

      So I guess the short answer is "use other people's art tools".

  • Like these guys (Score:4, Interesting)

    by barryfandango ( 627554 ) on Wednesday June 18, 2003 @10:14AM (#6233650)
    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.
  • u can play alot of these games on FHM.com..they have the 100 greatest games and there are alot of old school awesome games

  • ScummVM (Score:2, Informative)

    by ginbot462 ( 626023 )
    Don't forget ScummVM [sourceforge.net], based off Lucas Arts engine. You can use it to code your own.

    • Don't forget ScummVM, based off Lucas Arts engine. You can use it to code your own.

      Really, how so? There isn't any mention of rolling your own on the main SCUMMVM page, the faqs, or the mailing lists. In the documentation, there's one section entitled "The inComplete SCUMM Reference Guide" that looks woefully incomplete indeed, basically leaving it at "Well, we know a good bit about the format, so theoretically, you could build one yourself."

      Which is unfortunate, since after reading this article, I fi

  • HTML TADS (Score:2, Interesting)

    by ronfar ( 52216 )
    You can make very simple point and click adventures using HTML TADS [teladesign.com]. Note, this isn't anything like Sam & Max, but you have the powerful TADS text parser along with images, sounds and clickable links. It would be really easy to come up with something good, and I read that there is an X11 HTML TADS project. [sourceforge.net]

  • Plug, plug, plug - Loki! (Score:4, Informative)

    by McMac ( 87468 ) * on Wednesday June 18, 2003 @08:18PM (#6238891) Homepage
    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.
  • so many great games have been created using this program! go to www.agsforums.com and click on the games link. I highly recomend larry vales, PDA, (as mentioned above), the King's Quest remakes, and the rob blanc games.
  • It figures. I couldn't find an engine, so I just finished coding my own this week (and I'm wrapping up the editor this weekend). *sigh*

    I hate catching a craze a month late, when I could simply skim off the labors of others instead :)

    (Mind you, it only takes 1 week to make one, using Tcl/Tk, and said engine then works on Linux/Win/Mac. Just a little language advocacy.)

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