Point and click adventures

[gordebak]

What does everyone think of point and click adventure games? Do you think we need more of them for Linux? Like LucasArts games, i.e. Day of The Tentacle?

I'm fairly new to developing games, so I can't make one anytime soon, but is it worth the effort? Do people play ScummVM games?

[Arthur]

Not too long ago, I discovered the Monkey Island series, and started out playing MI 3 in ScummVM, then MI 1-3 in ScummVM and 4-5 in Windows since they didn't work too well in Wine. You may laugh at this, but I had no idea these games existed until a friend of mine introduced them. And I got to say, they (especially MI 1-3) are some of the most enjoyable games I've ever tried.

So while point-and-click adventures seems to have gone somewhat out of fashion, I believe there are good chances to get a valuable niche "market" for a well-made PaC adventure game. Furthermore, 2D seems to me like a great format for such a game (as opposed to FPS games, which people expect to be 3D).

Just my 2 pieces o' eight.

[gordebak]

Yeah, they are very enjoyable if written well. I'm a big fan of them.

Just planning to make one for Linux, but you know, their replayability is quite low. So, I don't know if it's worth the effort.

Most people are just crazy about 3d nowadays. I have an old-fashioned mind, and I love 2d games with soul. Wondering what people think.

[Peter]

I like point and click adventures and have played monkey island 1-3 and a few others. I have not seen any native point and click adventures for Linux so that would be nice.

I also very much like the predecessors of point and click adventures were you typed in things to do rather than click, but still had a graphical view. I have planned to do a game of this kind for a few years but not got very far yet. I have realised that the programming part will be quite small compared with all the graphics and story planning that has to be done. I think this is true for point and click adventures also as they are very similar.

I think the biggest problem with these kind of games is that it is easy to get stuck. You wander around for hours without any progress. This have made me stop playing quite a few games without finishing them. The line between too hard and too obvious is thin. The monkey island series was quite successful on this.

Only you can decide if it's worth the effort. You do the work, we just play

[Julius]

Problem is also that the expectations are extremely high in regard to story and artistic value due to the existance of those lucas arts gems, really hard to compete with that. Oh yes, too little replay value for a FOSS developed game.

[qubodup]

I'm fairly new to developing games, so I can't make one anytime soon, but is it worth the effort? Do people play ScummVM games?

I know of one project: http://sourceforge.net/projects/beastsd/
I believe they use a proprietary engine but perhaps you can change that

[snowdrop]

Adventure games á la good old Sierra Online & Lucas Arts with titles like Larry, Indiana Jones & the Fate of Atlantis, Monkey Island 1 & 2, Police/Space/Kings Quest, Broken Sword to mention a few legendary gems, are very viable today and healthy on the indie scene where they're mainly at now a days.

There are seldom any new titles released, but check out Runaway: A road adventure or Machinarium (Linux as well) and be blown away by what such amazing titles can give you.

Unfortunately the era of this genre has long gone due to the 3d-hype that still holds the new generations of players in it's most often totally unnecessary grip. As an effect the shift in the industry has been towards coolest 3d-effects and highest poly counts and a quest for photorealism instead of on scripts, story, good universe and solid gameplay. Yeah, I'm one of those that would claim that Monkey Island 1 & 2 (the original ones) are way better games than 95% of the shit that the industry spews out, pound for pound.

Creating them
By using http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/ (win) you can easily create a game within just a couple of hours and almost zero knowledge. It's the best tool I've seen to date, and I have tried them all.
Beauty is it's free and that you can run the game on Linux as well with a port of it's run time code.

Warning
If you lack an artist of some sort you should probably focus on using Inform7 instead (wonderful and amazing tool, I even manged to get my game running online in browser) - adventure games that use graphics must have somewhat viewable art, if not, they're doomed to never be played, no matter how good they are. With viewable I don't mean any specific style, just a consistent one that most people could accept. (E.g. south park style seems to be perfectly fine for most, to just use an example of how low the threshold can be and still work out)