A new adventure: the point and click

Well, the bad news is that my game idea didn't get picked, but the good news is that I get work on a prototype for another genre of games that I love, the Adventure Game (Point and Click) genre. However, it is not all sunshine and rainbows, in my personal opinion there are some deep problems with the adventure games of today.

The adventure game genre has been around for a long time. It was once a very popular genre (in the 90's), but has since fell by the wayside and has become a niche genre. While Double Fine was able to raise some 3.4 million dollars via Kickstarter to make a new adventure game, that does not mean the genre is in anyway mainstream. Rather, it had more to do with the fact that Ron Gilbert and Tim Schafer, two of the fathers of the genre, were going to be creating the new game. While I do love adventure games, I have not been playing them for long, so that gives me more of a fresh view on what the genre does well and what it does poorly.

Most of the people who play adventure games today are the same people who were playing them in the 90's. While the number of gamers has grown at a rapid pace since the 90's, the point and click genre hasn't attracted a large percentage of these new gamers. I have been gaming since 1998 (at the end of the adventure games), but I never really got into them because I was a console only gamer until 3 years ago. Only then did I get into adventure games, in fact, only because Sam and Max: The Devil's Playhouse offered a promotional hat that I could wear in Team Fortress 2. I immediately enjoyed the game, being a huge comedy nerd, the humor stood out and sold the genre for me. Coming from being a mostly FPS gamer, the characters, plot, and dialog were so much more fun and compelling than anything I had experienced before. But I quickly noticed some problems.

Not to be an ego maniac, but I would list myself as an intelligent human being. Never before in a game had I found myself completely stumped, but in a point and click game this happened almost immediately. I don't mind having a hard problem to solve, I know what I need to do, and if I play for long enough I know I can figure it out. But, in adventure games, I frequently find that this happens, but it is usually because I have no idea what I am supposed to be doing. For example, in Secret of Monkey Island, why would I ever think to step on a board 3 times to scare off a bird so that I can pick up a herring to give to a troll. I never would, and without a walk through I would have never figured it out. I know how good it feels to figure out a difficult problem, but it adventure games it is all to often a feeling of relief, rather than a rush of joy. While I am trying to figure out this strange ordering of events I spend an hour walking from one side of the town to the other, because my character only moves at a snail pace and there is no fast travel.

When you compact these two elements together it can become obvious why many players trying adventure games for the first time find them either frustrating or boring. It is easy to identify a problem, but the difficulty is coming up with a solution. The second problem, long travel times, is easy to solve; either add a fast travel, or allow players to run rather than just walk. This seems simple, but it makes the game much less grating when you realize that you missed an item and you will have to walk to the other side of town. Action games can keep the tempo up by throwing enemies at you on your backtracking path, but once you run out of dialog in an adventure game there is nothing to do but watch your character walk slowly across the screen.

Unfortunately, the other problem is a little more difficult to solve. We want to allow beginners to be able to progress at a reasonable pace, but the same time though we want experienced adventure gamers to be able to play the game without hints. Drawing from the limited number of adventure games that I have played, in only one game have I had a general idea of what I needed to be doing at all times. In Sam and Max: The Devil's Playhouse there was a mechanic that allowed you to see into the future. In the future sequence you would see the last second or two of the solution to the puzzle in the area. For instance, you would see that a monkey teleports off the edge of a roof and falls to the street knocking him out. This mechanic did not tell you how to solve the puzzle, rather it gave you a vague idea of what the outcome needed to be. You still had to solve all of the puzzles by using your own intuition, but at least you would have a general idea of what you needed to be doing (which is much better than wandering aimlessly).

My solution, is a little more scalable. We have decided that our main character will have a small pet companion (like a hamster or something). My thoughts are that we could use the hamster to indicate hints based on the hint level. If user wants to play with no hints, the hamster will not do anything. However, if they want to play at the highest hint level, then the hamster will direct the user by standing next to the door they should enter, or making motions to signify the use of a certain object. This could easily be scaled to any value in between as the user desires. Furthermore, the hamster hint level could be scaled dynamically based on the amount of time that has passed without the user making progress towards solving the next level. Meaning, the experienced point and click players could go through the game without ever seeing a hint, but those who are new to the genre will receive more hints. Then everyone would be able to complete the game without the use of a guide, and without wandering aimlessly for the better part of an hour.

In conclusion, point and click adventure games are amazing experiences that I wish more people played and enjoyed. However, I believe that for this to happen some innovation needs to be done to ease players into the experience. Recently, more gamers have expressed the desire to play games that have more depth in terms of story and characters. The best adventure games of times pasts contain plots, characters, and locations that are leaps and bounds ahead of any shooter that I have ever played. These games have the atmosphere to impress gamers, but the mechanics need to improve enough to not scare the new gamers off.