Adventure games are traditionally like books, and all books are linear. Once you read them, that''s it, like the OP mentioned. So the only way I see of making adventure games still conform to what they are (digital narratives) and yet give the player extra freedom is to model them after a different type of book: Choose Your Own Adventure. They''re great examples of nonlinear books. All adventure games I''ve ever played have a definite middle and end, if you could change that so that every action the player makes affects the game, and did it well, it would be a real fun game to play, and then play again (to get a different ending), and again ... because every time you played, you''d get something totally different.

You are both mainly talking about adding nonlinear stories to adventure games. While nonlinear stories would be nice, it''s not that important. The problem with most adventure games is they also have linear gameplay, and the linearity of the gameplay is what often causes frustration. Neoshaman talked about PC games vs. console games (RPGs for the most part), and although the console RPG is one of the most linear genres besides traditional adventure games there are a least multiple solutions to the core of the gameplay (the battles.) In an adventure game, for the most part, there is one solution to any given puzzle.

In console RPGs, any given battle can be won many ways using a combination of basic actions in a winning sequence. In order to beat the Ultimate Hot Pink Atma Weapon X in Final Fantasy XXX you wouldn''t have to follow a specific sequence of "fight, fight, cure 2, fire 3", you could use any sequence that keeps your character alive and kills the enemy. In a traditional adventure game however you absolutely have to use the ice block on the old lady to get her to drop her dentures. Generally there is no other way to solve that given puzzle.

The goal is to end up with multiple emergent solutions to a given puzzle, instead of one scripted solution (linear book), or even multiple scripted solutions (choose your own adventure).

quote:The goal is to end up with multiple emergent solutions to a given puzzle, instead of one scripted solution (linear book), or even multiple scripted solutions (choose your own adventure).

Bingo.

quote:A lot of humor is situational (Seinfeld, the Simpsons) so simply allowing for funny consequences rewards and actions in your game, instead of explicitly writting jokes or creating a funky conversation analyzer, could be a better idea.

I agree...but you worded it more clearly than I did here:

quote:Beyond that, you have wacky situations which the designer builds in (and could be dynamically created by rules that determine interesting juxtaposition of events and objects both physically and temporally). The same could go for dialogue. How to be shocking: the rules, for example.

However I don't think dialogue should be neglected.

[edited by - bob_the_third on August 13, 2003 7:10:33 PM]

[edited by - bob_the_third on August 13, 2003 7:12:21 PM]

Neoshaman: I share your sentiments.

While the MI games were fun, the puzzles really weren''t always very logical and they drove eachother. Each puzzle was designed to allow you to get what you needed for the NEXT puzzle. I''m not really interested in puzzles. I''d much rather have a dynamic emergent story. Some of that story can be scripted; well not really scripted, but rather SEEDED with a script. The difference is that seeding it with the script basically means that if the script is followed by all characters exactly, then the result will match the "ending" of the script. But the main character can deviate from the script as they see fit. Their deviations cause a ripple effect which cause the NPCs to deviate according to the rules of the game world. Thus the story mutates in response to the player. Basically you get to play a book and see what ending you get. Is it anything like the "intended" ending? What other endings can you get?

This idea is very intriguing to me.

One issue that must be addressed is the Fail -> Save -> Load -> ... loop. I don''t like it. It''s like having to backup your work on your computer: an odious task that''s fraught with slipups and frustration. A better solution is needed.

So my better solution? Store a branching timeline recording every single event that happens in the game world. It autosaves as to not bother the player. When the player gets stuck in the well with no way out, they pull up the timeline (or rather tree I guess), selects the point the want to go back to by event or gametime, and starts again. At this point another branch is added to the tree; think of it as a parallel universe. If you play for a while to point B, get stuck, go back to point A, then play to point C, you have a tree that looks like this:

   A /   \  B     C 

So there are now two different event paths from A. Kinda like the sci-fi idea of alternate parallel universes that enumerate all possible actions.

This system would never burden the user with saving their game and would permit them to try as many things from as many points as they wanted without overwriting any other part of their game progress.

The obvious hurdles are storage space required and the speed of performing the autosave. Both are big, but I think the speed is the bigger of the two. As to the size, if you only have one save-file per user for this game, what''s wrong with it being 50-200MB? However having to log to file constantly would greatly slow down most games. RAM buffering would be a must, but still you''d have to go to memory frequently to reduce the ods of a crash resulting in a loss of data. The less frequently you flush the file to disk, the faster it will run, but the more likely the player is to have to replay something. Both are irritations. Clearly this needs significant thought and design work.

Okay, time to stop fighting sleep. YAWN....

quote:Original post by bob_the_third
While the MI games were fun, the puzzles really weren''t always very logical and they drove eachother.

Yeah, I think this is one of the biggest problems with adventure games. The solutions are often funny and clever but they are rarely the most logical thing. Sometimes you have to do stuff that wouldn''t work in real life, period, other times you have to do stuff that only works in that single case, sometimes you have to do things twice to get a response, etc. I think some kind of unified, more emergent puzzle system can fix this. It would at least give the player some kind of expectation of how the gameworld should react to their actions, as opposed to just having to try random things on different objects and hoping they work.

quote:
Each puzzle was designed to allow you to get what you needed for the NEXT puzzle. I''m not really interested in puzzles. I''d much rather have a dynamic emergent story. Some of that story can be scripted; well not really scripted, but rather SEEDED with a script. The difference is that seeding it with the script basically means that if the script is followed by all characters exactly, then the result will match the "ending" of the script. But the main character can deviate from the script as they see fit. Their deviations cause a ripple effect which cause the NPCs to deviate according to the rules of the game world. Thus the story mutates in response to the player. Basically you get to play a book and see what ending you get. Is it anything like the "intended" ending? What other endings can you get?

Many people want experiences like this, it''s a lot easier said than done. The core gameplay of an adventure game is the puzzles, so I''ve been focusing on improving those. Dynamic stories are a good goal, and it could work well for any type of game, but it''s a different discussion (kind of.) You explained what you want, but how do we do that? You don''t have any algorithmic or design ideas to make this a reality. I think the games that are closest to having dynamic stories tend to be open-ended strategy games, and they''re traditionally not known for their stories, probably because they aren''t scripted at all. So you may have a really interesting game of Civilization, or Master of Orion or the Sims that you could come up with a cool story for, but there''s no guarentee.

There are also games with generally open ended structure that have scripted events and missions that can take place out of order (Morrowind, GTA games, etc.) Personally I think this is the way that adventure games, RPGs and action games should take their storytelling. Have a collection of events that are part scripted (dialog, mission goals) and part emergent (solutions, characters involved, location.) The events are triggered depending on the players actions, location, time, previous events, randomly etc. but have no exact predefined order. I think this is a good balance between structure, freedom, narrative and gameplay.

Interesting save system btw. I hate to have to constantly save, even with quicksave, so I like autosave a lot. The branches could simply be at key moments in the game ("checkpoints") and you could literally have an undo key or a photoshop style gameplay history. Getting stuck without any escape generally isn''t a problem in Lucasarts games, but it was a big issue in some of the Sierra games and a huge issue in some old text adventures. Probably the worst thing an adventure game can do is get the player stuck, not kill them off, and have them searching for a solution for hours when there isn''t one.

quote:You explained what you want, but how do we do that? You don''t have any algorithmic or design ideas to make this a reality.

You called my bluff. I have no clue. Okay, so I do have a few ideas...

Here goes (some of this is recap from what I''ve already posted, maybe I can flesh it out a bit):

About that script. If the system is going to be dynamic, you can''t script the actions of characters. Instead you have to script events.

Gotta go. Have to free up the phone line. More on this later. Sorry.