Favorite adventure game interface style

I sometimes wonder if a minecraft-like crafting mechanic could work instead of the more generic ‘use’ verb in adventure games. I’m not entirely sure what that would exactly look like but the idea that you can craft items from ‘stuff’ to solve puzzles sounds kind of interesting on its face.

Of course actually doing this may be… problematic to say the least. You would need to allow a rather generous amount of freedom in crafting, and then in turn in the actual puzzle design. I suppose you could make puzzles require attributes of objects rather than actual objects. Like something need to be ‘sharp’ to fix a puzzle, or ‘blunt’ or something like that.

It should be possible to work something out but I can’t really think of a way to make this interesting. It seems the puzzles very easily become either trivial or impossible if it is too generic, whereas if you need to craft specific things (if you used minecraft’s interface directly) it becomes just guessing.

I guess this was quite a digression, sorry :slight_smile:

The one thing I do not like about the verb interface is how it takes away precious screen space. I kinda really like games with little to no (permanent) interface elements, as that allows the graphics to really shine. Guess Ultima VII has really spoiled me in that regard! :slight_smile:

With TWP, the graphics actually extended below the verbs, so this might be one way to improve upon the games of old. Maybe the verb/inventory panel could even hide itself until you mouse over that area.

As for the sentiment, that a greater selection of verbs will enable better puzzles, I am not so sure I am buying this. Looking at TWP, I cannot really find many cases were the verbs provided a big advantage over a single, generic “use” option. Franklin certainly would have been less cool without his special verbs, but difficulty-wise I don’t think there would have been a significant difference. For me, the verbs seemed mostly a nod to the classic games, not a strict requirement to get the game functional.

I am also of the opinion that the difficulty of a game should not hail from UI complications (or else we might as well return to a text parser interface), but from within the game world itself, i.e. the objects, hotspots and hints at our disposal.

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[quote=“TMM, post:21, topic:317”]
I sometimes wonder if a minecraft-like crafting mechanic could work instead of the more generic ‘use’ verb in adventure games.
[/quote]There is an adventure mode in Minecraft: http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Adventure
That said, I haven’t seen an adventure map which really impressed me. I’ve tried a few, and they were always glitchy or broke completely within minutes. Not sure if the map authors just did a sloppy job or if the engine just isn’t suitable for this.

What if I want to LOOK at it instead of opening?

90% of the fun in an adventure game comes from the jokes the characters say while looking at something.

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Well, look is not a manipulation, so it does not need to be “direct”. So I’d say it does not need to be done with one click. Two clicks are fine.

Ok, but then how would you recognize the user’s intention? You touch a door because you want to open it or because you want to look at it - how can I understand what you want to do? Single touch to open the door and a quick double touch to explore the alternatives? I, as a PC user, would expect the opposite - double click is always a confirmation, so double touch would mean to me “do the most obvious thing” while single touch would be “open the coin”.

There’s another way - touch interfaces taught us that “touch and hold” means “open contextual menu” - however, this means you play part of the game with your finger blocking the screen. Dragging can’t be an option (for example, I hated using ScummVM on mobile for that reason).

So… I see what you mean, but I still think that “touch object, touch verb coin” is a good compromise for old-school gamers on mobile.

Fortunately there’s a solution: objects only have one primary (intended) function. Think about it. The purpose of the scissors is to cut. The purpose of the drawer is to be opened. The purpose of a lemon slice is to be squeezed. The purpose of a chair is to sit. The purpose of a glass is to be drank. (door : open. person: talk. shovel: dig. book:read.) And so on. So that is assigned to the left click. (Additionally you can also write what’s going to happen at mouse over, if you have the mouse.)

For everything else [pickup,look, climb, or what have you], you have the right-mouse button verb menu (which becomes a press-and-hold menu, on tablets)

Minecraft has all sorts of crazy-ass mods but I wonder why noone has made a big adventure game in Minecraft yet… this was an idea I had a while back but it didn’t get very far, essentially trying to construct a ‘maze’ of sorts on a multiplayer server that players would test their wits against. I think this was back in beta so it was mostly crude booby traps.

So, we would have never had “lipsticked to death”.

See, I don’t agree at all - you’re talking about puzzle games, not “adventure games” in the sense I intend. Looking at things IS the primary function for me in an AG, since it gives a way greater sense of immersion than just using stuff.

sorry, what do you mean?

There’s a glass in the Hotel lobby. It’s there for apparently no purpose, you can’t pick it up, you can’t use it. You can just look at it and the characters say “it has been lipsticked to death”.

According to your vision, the user should touch that glass and say “I can’t drink from it”. End of the story.

Sorry, but I really don’t like it. As I said, looking at things should have a greater weight in an adventure game than just using objects. Otherwise it just becomes a clicking puzzle games, where you just tap around and advance if you get the right sequence of touches.

And even if we don’t consider the immersion factor, choosing WHAT to do with an object is part of the puzzle. In my game, for example, you solve one of the goals by selecting “walk to” on a window. With a single-click interface, you would just open/close it. The puzzle is actually having to choose an unexpected “verb”.

What? no… you can right click and then click “look”. I don’t see the problem. What’s wrong with two clicks for look?

I’m sorry, I didn’t explain myself right.

The problem with having, I quote, “only … one primary (intended) function” is that you’re hand-feeding the solutions to your players. You have a glass on a table and by a single click you’re already telling your player if this might be a useful object (that is, you tap it and the character picks it up directly or uses it somehow), or that it’s just there for decoration (you tap it and the character just looks at it).

In such a setup, nobody would look at things since it should be totally useless. Why explicitly look at something if I can just tap it to see what happens? In your setup, I tap on the glass, the primary function is either “drink” (and I get a “can’t drink” response) or “look” (and I know directly that I will never be using that object). In the first case, I’d never look at it, since I know from the game design that I won’t get anything useful from looking at it - otherwise it would have been the primary function, like “there’s a fingerprint on the glass” for example.

And, as I said, it would destroy the “use a secondary verb” puzzles. Why should I try to click “walk to” on a window if 99% of the time I just need to tap once to make a progress? The fact that you’re always giving the player a choice is enough to push the player to try more than just one interaction, and that’s what makes adventure games fun.

I think that’s a really good point. Encouraging exploration is maybe even more important nowadays for new players.

note the primary function will never be the solution to the puzzle. (because this is an adventure game. the solutions are never obvious, and the primary usage is always obvious). otherwise we would spoil the puzzle, as you say.

I have the solution for mobile adventure games in the next era:

vocal recognition, you setup it in menu then using only your finger to move the character in the scene and once you find an hotspot… LOOK, PULL
no coin, verbs, clicks, just your voice :slight_smile:

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(just wanted to say that this thread has become super-interesting for those who are interested in adventure game design. I’ll keep lurking to read your opinions and to learn from the experience of those of you who are developers, or just gave a deep thought about user interfaces. kudos!)

to the contrary… you won’t get anything useful from the primary functions. You’ll only get useful things from non-obvious, secondary functions. This is an adventure game :slight_smile:

The next evolution of a language parser from old text adventure games. Wild idea, I wonder to what extent you’d need any kind of machine learning for it to work well. How many ways are there to say “use chainsaw gas in chainsaw”? I’d love to be able to say “fill chainsaw with gas” for instance. Weird example but it’s a more natural, yet situational verb.

In fact you can create some nice verbal shortcuts like this - chainsaw gas can just be referred to as gas once you’ve got it in your inventory.

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The voice recognition thing could be cook, but I’d never use it :stuck_out_tongue: I can’t imagine myself yelling “use chansaw on dead body” on the train.

Anyway:

ok, then it makes sense if you put it this way.

The real problem is, IMHO, that AGs don’t translate well to mobile. Mouse-over is too important. A friend of mine made his game with a FullThrottle-style coin - a hand, a mouth, an eye. You tap an object, see its name and get the icons. There are some funny jokes because the mouth isn’t always talk to, but sometimes bite or eat or lick, but you would notice it only with a mouse-over text OR if the verbs were written under the icons (screwing up the whole UI). So what you get on mobile is that you tap the mouth icon and only after choosing the interaction you see that it was meant to be “bite coin”.

And this is the same thing I had in my game - you NEED to tap something just to see what it is. Especially if you don’t have hotspot highlighting, tapping helps you see if the object you see is just background or something you could interact with. Having a mouse cursor you just move around helps a lot in designing puzzles, jokes and a non-frustrating player experience.