Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
watching the avatar walk deliberately from place to place boring. On the other
hand, if you offer a rich, detailed world and your game expects the player to exam-
ine everything closely for clues, the user interface must make slow and accurate
movement possible.
Manipulating Objects
Determining how the player should manipulate objects presents one of the greatest
challenges of designing an adventure game. The player typically must figure out
what to do with particular objects to solve puzzles and advance the game. In text
adventures, this amounts to guessing the correct verb. Play often produces inter-
changes that look like this:
> OPEN DOOR
The door is locked, but it looks pretty flimsy.
> BREAK DOOR
I don't know how to do that.
> SMASH DOOR
I don't know how to do that.
> HIT DOOR
I don't know how to do that.
> KICK DOOR
The door flies open.
Sometimes this is fun; a lot of the time it isn't. In graphic adventure games in
which the player uses a mouse or a handheld controller, designers no longer face
this sort of problem but still have to decide how to allow the player to manipulate
objects. The following sections outline some approaches.
IDENTIFYING ACTIVE OBJECTS
With the advent of 3D-modeled worlds and powerful physics engines, just about
every object that's not part of the scenery can, theoretically, be manipulated or
picked up by the avatar. However, most objects in a scene don't actually play a role
in the story; they're just part of the set decoration. The player needs a way of recog-
nizing the active objects in a particular location. Text adventures used to print a
list of active objects. Graphic adventures typically use one of four mechanisms:
■
Hunt and click.
Active objects don't look any different from anything else; the
player simply has to click everything in the scene to see which parts are active.
This makes the scene look realistic, but the player may find it annoying, especially
if some active objects are small or partially hidden. Designers have generally aban-
doned this method in favor of the following ones.
