How organic is the design process for your games? Did the onset of graphics
end up limiting how much you could change your game?
Very organic, but you’re right, graphics games are far more limiting in terms of how
much the game can change once it gets beyond the original design stage. Of all my
games,AMFVwas probably the one that changed the most as the game’s production
progressed. Originally, it was a much more ambitious, much less story-oriented game,
almost a “future simulator” where the player would be able to set parameters in the
present and then travelnyears in the future to see what world would result from those
decisions.
I also think that development works best when the game grows during implemen-
tation, rather than mapping/plotting out the entire game to a fairly high detail level and
then starting implementation. That is another big advantage of text adventures over
graphic adventures. It allows me, in a game likeLGOPorHoboken,to find and then
hone a voice/style while a lot of the game is still on the drawing board, resulting in
better, more unified work.
A big issue for adventure games seems to have been difficulty. For instance, if
the game is too hard, you are likely to frighten away new players. But if the
game is too easy, the hard-core players will dismiss your game. Do you have
any idea what a solution to this problem might be?
Difficulty was a constant problem. Our games got consistently easier, which didn’t
seem to help attract any new players, and definitely seemed to turn off our hard-core
fans. Hint books and later in-game hints were definitely considered ways to keep the
games pretty hard without discouraging newer, less sophisticated, less masochistic
players. It’s a pretty good solution, because if the game is too hard, hints can help make
the game a good experience for a weaker player, but if the game is too easy it’s pretty
much ruined for a stronger player. Another solution is to have multiple difficulty levels,
with more in-story clues in the easier levels, but this is obviously a lot more work to
design, program, and balance.
A frequent complaint one sees about adventure games is that they don’t have a
lot of replay value. As a designer, what do you do to add that replayability, or do
you not consider it a big issue?
Yes, that became increasingly a big issue as my games were competing not so much
against other adventures and RPGs, but against strategy games likeCivilizationand
RTS games likeWarCraft.To some extent, you can have replayability in adventure
games. For example,Suspendedwas an extremely replayable Infocom game, as you
strove to finish the game with the lowest possible casualty levels. Even withZork I,I
remember a New Jersey couple who used to write to us constantly with new ways to
win the game in ever-fewer numbers of moves. Alternate puzzle solutions and “meat
on the bones” responses to wacky inputs are other ways to extend playtime. But for the
most part, it’s just a matter of making sure that it takes thirty or forty hours to play the
game, and hoping that that’s enough to get a person to spend forty or fifty dollars on it.
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