Category: Adventure Games
ADVENTURE GAMES · INTERACTIVE FICTION · RESOURCES
Tools to make narrative games
2 January, 2018Clara Fernandez-Vara33 Comments
Since I have to keep up with a variety of tools for narrative games and interactive narrative, I
have decided to share the list of resources that I keep. This post will be a living document, so
I will update as I come across new tools.
If you have any suggestions for resources that should be included, please contact me.
Tools
Twine 1+2
Twine is one of the most popular tools to write hypertext fiction; it creates HTML files that
can are easy to share online. It is very accessible and has a large of community and plenty of
resources and tutorials. Very recommendable for beginners; knowing how to use CSS styles
and basic programming can also go a long way.
Twine Home Page
ChoiceScript
A programming language developed by Choice of Games to create multiple-choice games, as
a Choose Your Own Adventure electronic book. Don’t feel intimidated by it being a
programming language: it’s based on javascript, and it’s very easy to use and get started, as
long as you keep your indentations in the text consistent.
Introduction to ChoiceScript
Inform 7
One of the most veteran tools for making narrative games, in this case parser-based text
games(the kind where the player talks to the computer to make games). Inform 7 uses a
language that uses sentences in English, which may take some time to get used to. It is also a
design suite that packs the editor, compiler and interpreter all in one. I recommend it as a
starting point to anyone who wants to create narrative games, because it teaches how to think
stories as simulated worlds rather than branching plots. A very strong community of
developers, as well as a variety of tutorials and resources makes this another good starting
tool for newcomers.
Inform 7 Home Page
Texture
An interactive fiction authoring tool online, that presents itself as an option between Twine
and Inform. The interaction consists of drag-and-drop words on top of other words, rather
than typing or choosing a hyperlink, which makes the results easily playable on a browser. It
also allows integrating images into your game; the development focuses on writing, and
provides easy menus to create conditional text – it is easy to use if you don’t feel comfortable
programming. It’s all online, so your work is saved in your cache; the tool allows you to have
a user account so that your work in saved on a server. A good fit for short games for mobile
platforms.
Texture Home Page
Fungus
For those of you familiar with Unity (whose personal use version is free, although it’s still a
proprietary tool) , it’s a free plug-in to make visual novels, although it can be easily
repurposed to include branching dialogue into any Unity game.
Fungus in the Unity asset store.
Ink and Inky
Ink is the scripting language developed by Inkle Studios to write choice-based games,
whereas Inky is the editor to create the text. It is a mark-up language, not very dissimilar
from Choicescript above, although in order to release it as a game it needs Unity. So you still
need to know how to use Unity in order to make a game. It’s open source.
Ink Home Page
Yarn – Dialogue Editor for Unity
A dialogue editor created as a tool for Night in the Woods as well as its companion games,
the texts generated with it have to be exported to Unity. The developers acknowledge they are
inspired by the Twine interface, and the program does import Twine files. Requires some
programming chops to set up and connect to Unity.
Yarn Github Repository
Chatmapper
A proprietary standalone dialogue mapping editor. The trial version can be used to prototype
conversation trees. The paid version allows creating dialogue simulations including visual
and audio assets, provides visualization tools of different branching, and even generates
scripts for voice actors, which can also facilitate localization. Uses LUA as a programming
language, and exports to a variety of formats that can then be plugged into your engine of
choice (XML, JSON, RTF, PDF, JPEG, Excel). May be best for larger projects with a lot of
dialogue and audiovisuals – and also developers who have an actual budget.
Chatmapper Home Page
Ren’Py
A visual novel engine that has been around since 2004, so that there is a large community of
support as well as tutorials. Uses Python, one of the most accessible programming languages,
it is also open source. One of its most attractive features is that it creates games that run both
on desktop computers as well as mobile.
Ren’Py Home Page
Adventure Game Studio (AGS)
A tool to make point-and-click adventure games. Initially created to make games in the style
of the Sierra adventure games (e.g. King’s Quest), it expanded to other formats and allows
developers to create their own style of adventure games. A classic tool that is now open
source, counts with a good community and extensive resources developed over 20 years of its
existence. On the downside, it is a Windows-only program, and requires special wrappers in
order to release games for other program.
Adventure Game Studio Home Page
Visionaire
A proprietary tool to make point-and-click adventure games, which means that the support
mainly comes from the company rather than a community. There is a free demo version that
allows making games with up to 10 rooms; the indie version for a single user is not too
expensive. It uses LUA as a programming language; the documentation is up to date if you
speak German, but it is a bit behind in its English version.
Visionaire Studio Home Page
RPG Maker
A proprietary tool to make Japanese-style role-playing games; it is pretty powerful and also
has an extensive community because it has been around for a long time. The games use tile-
based art, which facilitates both making visual assets as well as finding pre-made ones. It can
also be used to make adventure games.
RPG Maker Home Page
Adventure Creator for Unity
Another plug-in for Unity, also proprietary. It is a toolkit to make both 2D and 3D point-and-
click adventure games. It uses visual scripting, which is a bit more accessible to non-
programmers, and comes with a collection of pre-set templates to create inventories,
branching dialogue, and object interactions. There is a growing community of developers.
Adventure Creator Home Page
articy:draft3
A proprietary tool that can be customized for a variety of engines. Probably best tailored for
large games, it allows mapping your story and its logics, keeping databases of objects,
imports screenplay files from Final Draft, and connects directly to Unity. The developer also
offers cloud services to allow for collaborative writing for games. It’s a tool that is becoming
popular in the professional scene, though probably the most expensive all of the proprietary
tools listed here so far.
Articy: Draft 3 Home Page
The Gamebook Authoring Tool
Another proprietary tool, it is designed to make Choose-Your-Own-Adventure games, but
also works to write books.
Crumbly Head Games Main Page
Experimental tools
I’ve been receiving links to additional tools – some of them are experimental, some of them
are still in the works. I’m sharing them here for you to try – and please report back if there’s
one you particularly like!
Elm Narrative Engine http://elmnarrativeengine.com
Update 6 January 2018: Added articy:draft and Texture (Thanks to Evan Skolnick and Sarah
Schoemann for the pointers)
Update 25 January 2018: Started section on experimental tools and included a couple of links
that I received over email. Thanks to Jeff and Daniel for sending me their engines!
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ADVENTURE GAMES · THOUGHTS
Choice vs. Puzzles in Adventure
Game Design
10 January, 2013Clara Fernandez-Vara5 Comments
It is the season of writing game of the past year lists and hyping the games of the new
one. I’m delighted to see how Telltale’s The Walking Dead haunts most of these “best
of 2012” lists. Its success proves that adventure games still have a lot to say about
game design and game narrative, and that there can be a wide audience for them. It
also proves how choice design changes how we play and design adventure games.
The Walking Dead confir ms the potential of choice
design in adventure games, something that my friends at Choice of Games had already been
doing for a while. The core gameplay is making decisions, usually quickly, and living with
the consequences (or dying horribly). Although many scenes change depending on your
previous actions, because otherwise the choice would be superfluous, the game does not
degenerate into out-of-control branching. Instead, it changes specific aspects and scenes of
the story. Designing this game must have still been rather complex, which is what happens
whenever we have to set up a choice and a clear narrative consequence, but it is done in such
a way that choices create a hyper-tangled rhizome.
What I have not seen mentioned often enough in reviews how different The Walking
Dead is from other Telltale games, as well as from many other point-and-click
adventure games. This may come from the misconception that adventure games are
the electronic version of Choose Your Own Adventure books, so it may seem that this
is more of the same.It’s not.
Adventure games are simulations. This is obvious to anyone who’s written IF with
Inform, or created games with Adventure Game Studio, for example, but it’s a
concept that finds resistance from people who only play them, and usually without
much enthusiasm. Zork, Maniac Mansion, Machinarium are all based on creating a
world, a space, populated by characters and objects, which have different
relationships between them. The simulation creates challenges usually in the form of
puzzles, and the player has to solve it by understanding how the simulation works.
The story unfolds as the player interacts with the world and solves the puzzles.
The Choice of Games series, as well as The Walking Dead, shift the attention to
choice and consequence. This is obvious in the Choice Of… games, where the world of
the game is described, and our only interaction is selecting items from a menu. We
don’t interact with a simulated world, but with a world represented through text. The
Walking Dead is a nice hybrid between traditional point-and-click and choose your
own adventure, where some scenes allow us to walk around and explore the world at
our leisure, to learn about the place and gather information, which will inform our
decisions later. There’s less puzzle-solving, the core of the game is choosing the right
thing in the moments of crisis. Best thing of all, what the “right” thing to do is never
clear, and often makes you feel like you’re trapped in an awful situation.
As someone who designs adventure games focused on simulation and puzzle solving,
I really welcome games likeChoice of Zombies or The Walking Dead. It’s refreshing,
it proves that there is still so much to do in adventure games beyond paying constant
homages to our favourite games from Lucasarts or Sierra (I’m guilty of that too).
There is a wide design palette at our disposal, we just have to use it.
The Walking Dead and Choice of Zombies also fit choice design with their topic very
well. It makes sense that we cannot go many places, that there is not a lot to explore:
it’s the zombie apocalypse! Plus you’d better be careful with what you do, because
any choice could be your last. The limitations in the environment bridge very well the
world of the game and the game design.
Choice design is not new, RPGs have explored this for a long time, with varying
success. Think of all these games series: Fallout, Knights of the Old
Republic, Fable, Dragon Age… Often choices in RPGs are limited to “save the baby
or kill it” pseudomorality, where the consequences are relatively predictable. Some of
the examples just listed demonstrate how much more interesting choices become
when your expectations are thwarted, or, better enough, where there is no easy
choice, which is what probably is impressive about The Walking Dead.
Choice is not alien to adventure games either–Infocom’s Suspended depends on your
strategies to try to save the world before you are disconnected, for example. Point-
and-click adventure games included important choices, usually at the end, because
it’s easier to generate three different endings than start working on different
outcomes all throughout the game (see The Dig, or Gabriel Knight: Sins of the
Fathers, for example). More recently,Resonance did a wonderful job of incorporating
choices. (It’s hard to talk about it without spoiling it, but I’ll try.) Resonance also has
multiple endings, but does have choice points throughout the game that feel really
important, and even if the consequences of the choice are not so different (or
inevitable, when it comes to the twist of the game), the game makes you stop and
think about what you’re doing. This is mostly achieved by getting you to know the
characters and empathise with them, you spend time with them, and when the crisis
comes about, you feel for the characters, you feel the pain and the betrayal. The
consequences are emotional rather than changing the events. Resonance does in
practice what the publicity of Heavy Rain kept announcing, and the game eventually
failed to deliver.
The Walking Dead combines plot consequences with emotional consequences very
cleverly: early on, you see how your decisions can have awful consequences, people
die if you don’t act fast enough or do not make the right choice. Later on, the
consequences become more emotional than changing the events. Unlike the
adventure games listed in the paragraph above, where it’s a final choice that changes
the ending, The Walking Dead takes you to an inevitable ending with slight
variations, which may feel different depending on how you have chosen to play your
character. That’s eventually the triumph of the game: choice design is about the
psychology of the player, not about showing off a complex system.
The possibilites of new adventure games are wide open, it’s our choice. Those who
said that adventure games were dead didn’t expect them to come back shuffling their
feet and try to rip their gut open.
ADVENTURE GAMES · THOUGHTS
The Last Symphony: Hidden in
Plain Sight
20 December, 2012Clara Fernandez-Vara1 Comment
As promised, here’s a bit of story behind the game The Last
Symphony, why we made it and what we came across. My goal is to
let you in the creative process, but hopefully without spoiling the
game or being pretentious about what the game really
achieves. What the game means is mostly up to you, really.
The conceit of the The Last Symphony is that everything is hidden
in plain sight: the objects, the stories, the people, the music. The
challenge is to reveal what is hidden, and figure out what that may
be. In the process, we invite players to do things that they’re not so
used to doing, such as paying attention to the text, listening, and
coming up with their own stories.
My lovely colleagues at the lab put together this fine video that
explains the research and the game. This blogpost extends what is
in here.
As I say in the video, the focus of the project was environmental
storytelling. I had developed this concept, indexical storytelling,
which refers to design techniques to construct stories in the
environment by leaving traces or indications, and I wanted to put it
to the test. You can read my paper on the concept, or watch one of
the industry presentations that I have given on the topic online if
you need more detail.
A hidden object game seemed to be the way to go. It was perfect for
my purposes: related to adventure games, the genre I know best, it
was not a particular technical challenge, and a scope was feasible
in the length of the summer program (8 weeks!). Plus hidden object
games are all about environment: you’re scouring the screen,
finding items in the jumble. Hidden object games seemed to be in
need of some environmental storytelling techniques, so that the
story also happened in the screens that the player spends the most
time at, not only the cutscenes. Although some of hidden object
games are certainly trying hard to give relevance to the objects you
seek, and are leaving behind the photoshop-the-hell-of-it technique,
there was certainly room for improvement. Hello, research!
I was lucky to get a fantastic team to work on the game, most of
whom had not really played any hidden object games, but who also
saw the potential for improvement after playing as many demos as
they could. Since it was a game that was heavy on visual assets, I
got the largest artist team of the program, plus the game designer is
also an illustrator, and even the producer also had experience in
animation. (Please note the wonderful team that made the game at
the bottom of the page. They’re going to be big in the near future.)
The first step was common to all my previous games: paper
prototyping. As with adventure games, the catch was that we had to
have a story of the world which would shape the environment, and
from that we wanted to have a set of mechanics that related to
finding objects on a screen. Story and prototype had to go together.
With all the visual focus,it was ironic that that during brainstorming
and prototyping, everyone’s favourite story was reconstructing the
life of a music composer. This opened up the way to use music as
another layer to tell the story, which I personally was very excited
about (I love film soundtracks, and never miss the chance of using
the music as a narrative element as well), and so was our audio
designer. He has written his own blog post about the role of the
music of the game, so go read it too.
In implementing the game, the main challenge was that every
object on the screen had to be there for a reason. A lot of the
weight of indexical storytelling fell on the illustrators, who had to
negotiate constantly where things would go and why. Every object
is part of a story, like a puzzle piece, it had to come from
somewhere, and it had been left where it was for
a narrative reason. (Well, at times there were technical reasons,
like you don’t want to put small objects at the back of the room,
because then players have to find a pixel). At times it is surprising
to realize that, in order to improve games, you only have to think
about what you’re doing, rather than going through the motions of
what’s been done before. It takes a tad more time, but in the long
run it does not become a problem for production, although it
scheduling has to accomodate for it. It may seem obvious, but it
bears repeating: innovation comes from putting a bit of thinking of
where things come from.
What was still missing was how to make the objects meaningful.
The events of the stories in the game have left a trace in the space,
but how can the players also leave a trace? The first step was
figuring out who the player was in the game: a museum curator
seemed like a natural role, which would justify why one would go
and look for objects in a house and take them away (detectives and
thieves are trite at this point). Curators also have to construct a
narrative based on objects. Based on that, we came up with a set of
mechanics where, after finding the objects, the player had to select
them based on which items may relate to each other and generate a
narrative.
We still had one piece missing: how does the player know what the
objects mean? How do we cover that gap? The cheap and fast
solution was to attach texts to the objects themselves. That
information could not be presented as the player found the objects,
or making them into hotspots–this was a hidden object game, not an
adventure game (I’d done that already). But what was the narrative
premise for that? Our player character could give us some
information on the objects, but we needed to reveal more. And
that’s where our lovely Ruth Carmine appeared.
One of my demands for the game was that the protagonist of the
game had to be female. There’s a dearth of female protagonists in
games (although they are more common in hidden object games),
and I was kinda embarrassed that only one of my three previous
games featured a female protagonist. Our usher to the world, and
the person who holds the key to the stories behind each object, is a
lovely English old lady, endearing and absent-minded, who has more
to her than just sipping her tea at 5 o’clock. We used Margaret
Rutherford as a model to make our lady come to life.
The end result is a game where the player has not only to find
objects but also figure out the story. Given our time constraints, the
mechanics that give you feedback on how related the objects are
not very complicated or have much depth. On the other hand, we
hope we turned a bug into a feature: rather than us telling the story
to the player straight out, the player must fill the gaps and come up
with their own. It’s not the first time that I’ve encouraged this in
games: Rosemary and Symon both thrive on leaving gaps. The
difference is that we have turned those gaps into an essential part
of gameplay, the goal of the game is to build the story through the
objects.
While we were playtesting the game, asking people to tell us their
version of the story was our part of the fun. At times people had
outlandish versions that confirmed, yet once more, that players
don’t read or pay attention to anything narrative. Others had very
interesting takes. Others were right on, even when we had provided
very little information. Players appropriated the objects and the
story and made it theirs. A lot of players still want to know if they
had got it right, see if they had guessed what the story is, and the
end of the game probably does not give you enough information.
We’re so used to winning and losing, to doing things a certain way,
that most players cannot stand the uncertainty of what had actually
happened. Although this game is not a David Lynch movie, it’s been
a treat to see how people try to make sense of it.
In my previous blogpost I talked about how I struggled with whether
to talk about the process or not. And what made me decide to write
is was really the desire to hear more player stories. So if you made
it this far, could you please play the game and tell me what the
story is?
