Quote:

---

Glitz Over Gameplay
The problem is that once something becomes technically feasible, the market demands it. Gamers themselves are partly to blame: Indie rock fans may prefer somewhat
muddy sound over some lushly-orchestrated, producer-massaged score; indie film fans may prefer quirky, low-budget titles over big-budget special FX extravaganzas; but in gaming, we have no indie aesthetic, no group of people (of any size at least) who prize independent vision and creativity over production values.









But the nature of the market and distribution channel is even more to blame. When a developer goes to a publisher to pitch a title, the publisher does not greenlight it because they play it and say "what a great game!" The developer may not even have a playable demo - but what he will have is a demo reel, a non-interactive visual pitch that may work to get some sense of gameplay across, but is mainly designed to impress the marketing dweebs with the graphics. Glitz, not gameplay, is what sells the publisher.









For that matter, half of the people sitting in on that greenlight meeting are probably marketing suits who think they're in a packaged goods industry, and are a lot more concerned about branding than anything else. Sequels and licenses, good; creativity - that's too risky.

---

Quote:

---

The result is that the average game (not the industry as a whole) loses more and more money. The publishers make up the losses on the few games that hit.
In other words: There is no room in this industry for niche product. There is no room for creativity or quirky vision. It's hit big, or don't try.

---

Quote:

---

Developers live from contract to contract - and if they don't land the next contract, they're out of business. Happens all the time. It's happened to me, in fact, and I'm hardly alone: Work like a dog, get to gold master, have a party to celebrate - and file for unemployment.

---

Quote:

---

Adventure games tell stories, and to do that adventure games create worlds. A game world can never feel alive unless it can be interacted with in some way. It doesn't have to be a video, it doesn't even have to be something that changes the game, but it has to be *something*. If you only allow your player to do things that immediately affect gameplay (though these are obviously the meat of the game and its interactivity, and the more you have of them and the more varied they are, the better), you will have a world that is functional - but not alive.

---

Quote:

---

People are yearning for the ability to freely move around the gameworld, looking at objects from every angle, opening every drawer, manipulating everything they see. This goes beyond 3D games as they currently are, or likely to be for some time yet. They (or some of them) want a wider range of actions like jumping and running and pushing. Immersion is the name of the game (or mimesis if you don't like getting wet.) Realism, the game making you feel you're actually there, virtual reality, enter the matrix. That's a valid viewpoint, and no doubt there are great 3D Adventure games to be made. But there is still a niche for slideshow Adventures. They still have value. Some reasons why.

---

Quote:

---

Over the years people have bemoaned the rise and fall of various gaming genres, but there has been little analysis behind the functional processes that drive this critical market systems.








Genres are a major defining factor in the creation of rich markets of avid gamers and designers ignore them at our own risk. We cannot assume that a genre will always exist, or that a genre will have competitive room for our latest title. A genre in the wane is a dangerous market where past success is no indication of future success.








Equally important is the opportunity that genres present. If we can understand how genres arise and change over time, we can tilt fate in our favor by releasing and developing new titles that hit emerging genres with the correct timing and release strategies.

---

Quote:

---

What’s ironic, is that the critically acclaimed, but sluggish-selling platformer, Psychonauts was supposed to be Tim Schafer’s answer to the supposedly dead adventure genre. Last I checked though, there seemed to be more than a few adventure games on the horizon and not so many platform games. Hmmmm…..

---

Quote:

---

Hi All,





Concerning characters and dialogue, I learned a very valuable lesson from Brad (Incredibles, Iron Giant) Bird when he taught at Cal Arts. He taught me that there are two types of story telling; action, and verbal. You have to make the right one for the right media. He was talking about the TV series A Family Dog based on the three short films he and Chris Buck made and that Tim Burton did character designs for, that showed as one episode of Steven Spielberg’s’ Amazing Stories. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/6302089611/103-3693783-0163047?v=glance . He said the TV series, produced by Tim Burton and Spielberg would fail because the A Family Dog original films were action based movies, where the main character was essentially a mime- a mute dog who expressed himself with acting. It was very expensive, fully 2d, animated acting that made that episode so good.





Well you can do that kind of acting if you have a big budget, like a feature film has, but you can’t when you are doing limited, low budget animation. And this was the problem with the Family Dog TV Show, they couldn’t fully animate the Dog because they just didn’t have the money. Brad Bird’s point was if you are going to do a TV show or a low budget animated film, it has to be about the dialogue, not the acting or animation, because you just simply can’t afford to do it. Brad proved this with his work on The Simpsons and King of the Hill. Both have ‘so so’ art and ‘so so’ animation, though it is story boarded and written incredibly well (The Simpsons has never ‘jumped the shark’).





So this got me to thinking about adventure games. Are they acting based or dialogued based? And it seems very clear to me they are dialogues based, more than TV even. A typical movie has 2000 lines of dialogue at most, and a typical TV show maybe half that. But a typical Lucas Arts adventure games has 7,000-10,000 lines of dialogue! That is four to five times as many lines as a typical movie. So to me, after game design, dialogue is the most important thing for a comedy adventure game, not the animation. But we still have the task of animating at least one TV show’s worth of animation to go along with those 7000 lines (that is another story).





So they best way to make the dialogue in our game good is to have a team of good writers, scripters and story board artists. One man alone can’t write all those lines and make each one entertaining. Ok. So Tim Schaffer can (he proved it with Full Throttle and Grim Fandango). But most writing mortals, like me, can’t. So right now we are starting to write all those lines. We are then going to chuck them and start over to make them even better, and then throw most of those out and make them even better then those.





A typical script writer has three goals: disseminate the plot, develop the characters and make the dialogue entertaining. An adventure game writer has all those goals and one more: to give the player the information he/ she needs to play the game. I am confident we can tell a great story, give the player the game play information he/ she needs, and develop interesting characters. To me, making the lines entertaining is the hard part.





And what will allow us to do that, without wasting money, is creating the whole game in a rough 2d format using freeware, first, before production. We use temp art and animation, and just wire the puzzle together, so the whole thing works. And then we go to town writing the silliest and funniest stuff we can think of that fits into the story, fits with the characters and situations. Then we test it and do it all over again, until we think it is pretty damn funny and entertaining. It’s a great way to prototype the whole game before we do a lick of final art, music, sound recording or 3d programming. It allows us the freedom to be spontaneous and creative, and, the best part, it doesn’t come out of out our production budget.





We just started it so I can’t tell you if it is a success yet, but we did practically the same thing on Curse of Monkey Island, and it worked great there, so I am confident we can get a lot of positive stuff out of this prototyping stage.






I hope that explains our writing and design philosophy.






Thanks,
Bill Tiller

---

Quote:

---

Adventure Architect Series

Quote:

---

It’s probably the industry's best kept secret that many of the most entertaining new adventure games these days are being designed not by the major studios, but by amateurs—fans of the genre working alone or in small teams to do something that we’ve all wanted to do at one time or another: create our own adventure game. Beginning this month, I’ll be taking my first steps down that road as well. I’ll report on everything I learn along the way, from choosing a game engine and deciding on a story idea to writing the plot and, eventually, even beta testing and completion.

---

---

Quote:

---

Schafer's not the only one comparing games to film. After leaving Vivendi Universal, Michael Pole joined up with former Electronic Arts Los Angeles executives Rick Giolito and Mark Skaggs to form Trilogy Studios. Where his previous position had him reluctantly nixing innovation as an exec at a worldwide publisher, Pole finds the shoe on the other foot now as CEO of a company making an episodic "first-person shooter/RPG combo" for PCs and next-gen systems.









Pole compares the current game industry landscape to that of the movie industry at the height of the studio system.









"They controlled the talent," Pole said of the movie studios. "They controlled the directors. Everybody was under contract, and for the longest time there seemed to be a stifling of creativity underneath that system. What the games industry is finding now is while you can amass an extraordinary collection of talent, extraordinary games are created within small teams. The best new intellectual properties are coming from independent--self-funded for the most part--studios."

---

Quote:

---

"This is a fast-changing industry and what feels like a good innovation in one year, you'll often discover in year two [isn't]. What sounded like a brilliant plan, we either just can't pull off because we can't figure out how, or you'll pull it off exactly like you say but when you play it, it's just not fun," Garriott says. "And you don't know it until you're done with the creating process, which is again why it is so risky. And the reason most people avoid risky experiments is because it's common to get to the end of the experiment and then throw it away."









The problem is compounded when innovating because one man's fun can be another man's frustration, which brings the issue back to Castaway and the difficulty of appealing to the masses.









"In order to have a game be successful with the numbers that they need nowadays, you need a significant percentage [of customers] to like the title," Michael says. "And, unfortunately, some people find some kinds of breakfast cereals great and others not, but a general one that we can all agree on is oatmeal, which is one of the blandest of cereals."









When it gets right down to it, oatmeal sells, and everybody knows it. But Stefan sees the mindset that innovation is prone to failure as a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.

---