I tried discussing this in my other topic “Graphic Adventure Games with physics”…….. but the thread has been derailed by silly little words games regarding the definition of an “adventure game”, and such….

….by “adventure games” all I meant is story driven games with the gameplay focused on finding/using items to progress……

and I thought that genre (where the entire focus is on the player interacting with the environment) would be a perfect place to begin thinking/discussing more interactive environments!

…….but for some reason thats an issue with some……..??..

So ignore that word/genre, and let's just discuss games in general!

How could they benifits from more interactive environments!?

SURELY THERE'S HEAPS OF WAYS!

There are "heaps of ways", but they need context.

1. What environments does your current game idea involve?
2. What can be interactive about those environments?
3. Does each of those interaction possibilities serve some useful purpose?
4. Can they be integrated into a coherent and promising game design, one worth prototyping?

It is also possible to start from gimmicks.

1. What reasonable and novel environmental interactions are currently underused?
2. What environments are they suitable for?
3. What can they do in a game?
4. What game can use those environment types and benefit from those interactions?

Blackberry said:
How could they benifits from more interactive environments!? SURELY THERE'S HEAPS OF WAYS!

Depends on the game, depends on the audience, depends on the interaction.

Even the degree of functionality depends on the context of the game.

There are games that are very similar to a children's storybook, and in that scenario being about to touch nearly anything and get a cute animation from it is potentially valuable. In a game focusing on young children I'd expect nearly everything to have meaningful interactions, touch an object and it does something fun or teaches something or displays more information or otherwise does something. That is part of the value. They provide no direct progress to the game, don't serve a useful mechanic, don't contribute to achievements or stats, and even slow down the game, but they are fun to the demographic of young kids exploring an interactive world.

That same level and type of interaction in more mature game environments provide nothing; once people are past around age 10 or so they're not looking for cute animations whenever you touch a tree or a vehicle or rock, touching an apple doesn't make it giggle or dance but instead adds it to your food inventory. Instead of interaction for learning and fun the players are looking for mechanics that impact the story or gameplay; in that different context they childlike animations are a distraction that could have been better spent elsewhere.

There's always tradeoffs with complexity vs simplicity, and there are complex interactions depth and utility and value. What works well in one market can be terrible in another market. A game focused on mixing ingredients for a variety of effects better have a wide range of ingredients and effects, but for a hack-and-slash game or bullet hell game all that effort would be a waste. What is a great value in one market is a wasted effort in another market, so it's going to always come back to those details.

Any kind of benefit offered would then be entirely dependent on the game being made.

Isn’t that the whole point of adventure games, to interact with the environment?

In King’s Quest IV, each discrete scene has at least one thing to interact with. Sometimes those interactions are only allowed after some global Boolean variable is finally set to true, based on some prior interaction.

if I’m missing your point, then please clarify your question.

P.S. Or, are you talking about interactivity for the sake of interactivity? Like, a shrub that interacts with an actor, for no reason other than to be interactive — it has no effect on the progress in the game.

frob said:

Blackberry said:
How could they benifits from more interactive environments!? SURELY THERE'S HEAPS OF WAYS!

That same level and type of interaction in more mature game environments provide nothing; once people are past around age 10 or so they're not looking for cute animations whenever you touch a tree or a vehicle or rock, touching an apple doesn't make it giggle or dance but instead adds it to your food inventory. Instead of interaction for learning and fun the players are looking for mechanics that impact the story or gameplay; in that different context they childlike animations are a distraction that could have been better spent elsewhere.

In every adventure game I've ever played (and I've played a lot), solving puzzles often comes down to trial and error. A smart player in a well-designed game can solve a puzzle in fewer trials than some young child smashing metaphorical buttons at random, but there are still going to be a lot of failures before success. The key to a successful adventure game, IMO, is to make the failures both fun and painless. And the key to making them fun is to have the game give some sort of unique response when the player tries something that doesn't work. Especially if it's something that seems like it could work.

It doesn't have to be a fun animation. In fact, it probably shouldn't be an animation because animations get annoying really quickly for older players. It should be something quick and painless, but also amusing, and hopefully something that helps the player get to the right solution without being too on-the-nose. Custom text messages are the default go-to for classic adventure games.

a light breeze said:
The key to a successful adventure game, IMO, is to make the failures both fun and painless.

Yeah, but this does not help against getting stuck, which i think is the main problem with old point and click adventures.
There were not many i could finish without looking up some walktrough.

a light breeze said:
In fact, it probably shouldn't be an animation because animations get annoying really quickly for older players.

I'm not a fan of cutscens. But even worse: Too much dialogue and walls of text. I have never finished any Monkey Island game becasue they talk too much. Overrated crap. Zak and Maniac Mansion was so much better. \:D/

JoeJ said:

a light breeze said:
The key to a successful adventure game, IMO, is to make the failures both fun and painless.

Yeah, but this does not help against getting stuck, which i think is the main problem with old point and click adventures.

Actually it does. The more fun it is to try things, the more things the player is willing to try before resorting to a walkthrough. At least that's the way it is for me. I've often looked at a walkthrough, found the solution to a puzzle, and thought to myself, “that was totally on my list of things to try”. But I got frustrated and turned to the walkthrough before actually working my way through my list of things to try because going through the list wasn't fun. At other times I have stumbled on a solution without even trying just because I was having so much fun clicking on random things with random objects.