A Hardy Developer's Journal – as written by indie adventure game developers

I’m sure that most of you are both gleefully and painfully aware of all the different techniques for creating an adventure game world. Apart from simply showing the world through sprites and background images; there are characters that tell players about the world, hot-spots with rollover text that tell them what they’re looking at, cut scenes that can show a wider view of the world, expository narration that tells players about the setting of the story… the list goes on.

For this particular article, I’d like to put aside these other techniques and focus on what it takes to create the game world visually. (more…)

One of my lecturers once said:

‘People in the past were all dumb, crazy, and weird‘.
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I stumbled upon one tiny image.

My brain burst into emotions. I remembered getting chewed out by my boss for messing up with a client, being recruited by a secret underground organization, running a smalltime casino in a jazzy little port town, I remembered my good friend who drove me across the land in his madly upgraded company car, exposing corruption, swinging a scythe, and in the end finally getting on a train with the girl I had been chasing all that time. I got chills.

All that came from one single image…

Correct. I remembered Grim Fandango.

“What if I could capture that in my art as well?“, I started thinking.
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They’ve done film noir; they’ve done zombies… this month Telltale has set their sights on the Monster Movie! The Devil’s Playhouse concludes in The City That Dares Not Sleep!

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Has nothing to do with U2's guitarist.

Over The Edge is the first chapter in the four-part series, The Journey Down. Written and designed by Theodor Waern, the game tells the story of Bwana, a simple fuel station attendant attempting to get he and his sidekick Kito’s plane airworthy in order to take a strange and beautiful woman to the mysterious area known as “The Underland” by going over what is known as “The Edge.” If you haven’t already, prepare yourself for some incredible freeware adventure gaming.

Barrow Hill is the first project of Matt Clark, a British independent developer who created the game almost entirely on his own. It is a title I was really looking forward to based on a large amount of positive reviews, because of its unique setting, because of being promoted as rooted in authentic pre-christian history, and also because of it supposedly being a refreshingly subtler take on the horror genre. Publicly available images and game overviews didn’t speak of monsters or gore, but of dark woods, old lore, mystery and suspense. (more…)

Again carrying on directly where the series left off, Beyond the Alley of the Dolls opens with Sam and Max being pursued by an army of Sam clones. The clones are horrible, half-naked, zombie-like evil copies of our hero. Which is a bummer, because an army of one’s own minds would kind-of come in handy – I could have finished this review a week ago!

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