Articles

The 21 Rules for Adventure Games 28 Aug, 2002 / Comments: 5

By DJG


Bill Tiller and Larry Ahern, 2 of our most beloved ex-LEC employees, have decided to help Adventure Developers 2.0 start off with a bang, thanks to their new article 21 Rules for Adventure Gaming. Bill Tiller, as you should recall, was the artist behind the lovely backgrounds for The Curse of Monkey Island and Larry Ahern was Co-director of the game. Says Bill:
Over the past nine years Larry Ahern and I have worked with many different adventure game designers and on many adventure games. We both contributed heavily to the game designs for all those projects. Larry even got to co designed The Curse of Monkey Island with Jonathan Ackly. During those projects we have learned a lot about the genre including these basic adventure game design ?rules?, or you could just consider them ?strong suggestions?. The word ?rules? seem a bit strong for such a flexible genre as adventure games. Also many of these ?rules? can be applies successfully to other game genres as well.
It's Sage advice, indeed. One new tip will be posted each week, so check it out.
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5 Comments

  • m0ds on 01 Sep, 2002, 08:15…
    Well from what I understood of it they were explaining how the puzzle should be set out clearly before we have to tackle it, and one way of showing this is cinematics.

    m0ds
  • m0ds on 31 Aug, 2002, 11:08…
    "If the goal of the level is to save the princess, use a cinematic at the beginning showing the villain carrying her off to his castle."

    Suggests to me the tip had *something* to do with cinematics, Jake :)
  • invisibelle on 31 Aug, 2002, 16:14…
    (this is jake) I think that the important part was to convey a clear goal to the player, and cinematics was one example. Saying "use cinematics, gotchya" is incorrect.
  • Marek on 31 Aug, 2002, 16:02…
    you didn't get it mods :P
  • Jake on 29 Aug, 2002, 11:34…
    Mysteriously some people didn't get the tip, saying things like "I agree that cinematics are needed." Beh.