Having decided that I’m building a 2D adventure game engine, it’s time to give it a name and figure out what I want out of it.
Following in the grand tradition of Apple frameworks, I’m calling it AdventureKit.
Whew. That’s enough for today, I think. Time for a beer…
Now that I’m starting to get into designing an adventure game, it’s time to come up with some concepts! How about an adventure set at a rural gas station late at night when it’s raining?
Warning: As ever, spoilers about this 26 year old game abound.
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis is a 1992 action adventure game from Lucasarts, featuring everyone’s favourite adventuring academic. It adheres tightly to the Indy tropes: a mythical ancient power has the potential to give the Nazis the edge and a sceptical Indy and a credulous sidekick (Sophia) have to go on a quest to find it first (which inevitably involves a little bit of colonial grave-robbing—altogether now: where does it belong?).
It’s a surprisingly realistic portrayal of what an archeological expedition might look like. As with many real life digs, it involves a lot of foreign travel, punching, and the widespread destruction of ancient artefacts.
This is part three of a series about adventure game dialogue. Part 1 analyses a simple conversation in The Secret of Monkey Island and part 2 takes a look at the tools that are already available
I part 1 I mentioned that using plain text as a game dialogue format is insane and should not be attempted.
What I didn’t mention was that I know this because I attempted it.
Erin ran the London Landmarks Half Marathon on Sunday in an impressive 1 hour and 56 minutes! I am so proud of her!
Here’s the sign I made so she could see us during the run (I can’t tell you how many times I did a two-finger tap on the page to try and undo a mistake—thanks Procreate! 😂).
In part 1 of this short series about adventure game dialogue, I used one of the first conversations in The Secret of Monkey Island as an example of the complexities involved in creating dynamic and believable dialogue in an adventure game.
In it, I mentioned that I might have accidentally become distracted by building my own dialogue editor. (If you’ve been following along with my journey into adventure games, you may be noticing a theme.)
Adventure games use a lot of dialogue. Characters are going to have to talk to one another and, unlike books or movies, game dialogue is non-linear and gets complicated quickly.
To see just how complicated it can get, I laid out the initial conversation between Guybrush Threepwood and Mancomb Seepgood in the Scumm Bar early on in The Secret of Monkey Island. This conversation is short enough to be manageable yet still has many of the advanced features of a complex interaction.
My second adventure game prototype is a traditional 2D adventure engine designed to explore whether the following are feasible:
My first adventure game prototype is an ARKit-based app designed to explore the following:
I am in the process of building two prototypes to explore different ways I could build an adventure game on iOS.
The first is an ARKit app. You interact with characters and then they send you off to real world locations to meet other characters, collect items, and solve puzzles.
The second is a more traditional 2D engine using SpriteKit and is heavily inspired by LucasArts’ legendary SCUMM engine. I want to create something modular that could then be used for many years in dozens of games.