Adventure Games - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 553

A context-sensitive perspective lets you (or the art director) play cinematographer,
using camera angles, composition, and lighting to enhance the story. Use these
techniques with discretion, however. A light touch is best. If you watch movies
closely, you'll notice that the majority of shots use a pretty straightforward camera
angle. Movie directors switch to an unusual angle when they have a particular
point to make, such as showing that the protagonist is alone, or in a high place.
THE SECRET OF MONKEY ISLAND
The Secret of Monkey Island , now nearly 20 years old, remains worth studying because it
spawned a highly successful franchise. Although it is ostensibly set on a Caribbean island
in the 1700s and concerns a young man who wants to be a pirate, the game features
anachronistic touches and is played for laughs. In that respect, it seems a lot like certain
Disney animated films — The Jungle Book , for example — although slightly edgier.
When Ron Gilbert, the designer of The Secret of Monkey Island, started work on the
game, he had already created an adventure game engine called SCUMM, an acronym for
“Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion” (an earlier LucasArts adventure game).
SCUMM represented an important innovation for graphic adventure games: It put the
possible actions on the screen so players no longer had to guess what their options were,
and it did away with typing. More important for the developers, SCUMM enabled them to
create new adventure games easily without programming them from scratch each time.
Three of the five Monkey Island games used the SCUMM utility in addition to Maniac
Mansion itself and several other LucasArts games.
The Secret of Monkey Island includes a number of other innovations as well, most notably
an insult-driven sword fight between the avatar, Guybrush Threepwood, and a master
swordswoman. Rather than making the fight a physical challenge, which would have
required a lot of additional programming and would have turned off some players,
Gilbert chose to use (and make fun of) the way adversaries always insult one another in
old swashbuckling movies. When his adversary insults Guybrush, the player must choose
an appropriate comeback quip. Choosing a good comeback gives Guybrush advantage in
the fight; choosing the wrong one forces Guybrush to retreat. For Guybrush to win the
fight, he must choose enough correct quips. The insults themselves contain clues as to
which reply is correct, so players don't have to find out by trial and error.
It's this kind of lateral thinking about the design that separates great adventure games
from merely good ones. The Monkey Island series belongs among the greats. The origi-
nal game has since been remade with higher quality graphics and has been released as
The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition .