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

Welcome back! Last time I bitched about old-school adventure game interfaces and tried to convince people to throw them out the window. Today I’m going to give an example of how I futzed around with the interface of my game, Resonance, adding a layer of potential complexity to the puzzles while keeping the interface simple, fast, and intuitive.

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Interfaces are important.  I love interfaces.  Forming an intuitive and fluid language that is used by the player to communicate with the game, and a way for the game to communicate back is fun.  But adventure games, even the commercial titles, rarely get much interface love.  Games in the genre tend to stick to one of the commonly used control schemes.  (more…)

So, you’ve got a whole lot done on your game, graphics are looking how you want and you’ve got some puzzles you really like. But hang on a minute, how do you know when your game is done? There’s always going to be moments when you go “I could just add a bit more on here”, and sometimes this is very beneficial. But you have to stop working on the game somewhere, or it’ll never get done.

This could be something so much bigger: It’s a natural feeling to get near the end of your project and think “This could be so much bigger!”. Parts you could add, bits you could extend – in fact if you’re like most people you’ll probably have ‘realized’ that the story you wrote would work so much ‘better’ as the first part in a trilogy. (more…)

Oh yeah, here’s the hard part. Ask anyone who has ever built a game and I am sure they’ll agree that this is where it stops being exciting and starts requiring some real determination. The honeymoon is over, the initial glory of your incredible idea has worn off and you’re left looking at your ‘to do’ list which seems to have no end. Stuck for motivation? Aren’t we all…
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Don’t worry, dear reader – I haven’t conducted an interview with myself by myself.

Not yet. But somebody else did (with me, I mean, not with themselves).

Here’s Part 1 and here’s Part 2. Have a great read!

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Starting a game is easy. It’s really easy – so easy that we often jump in before we’ve thought about it. But we’ve already covered thinking about it beforehand, so assuming you paid some attention back there, we’re ready to look at the next step. (more…)