TIGSource Forums

Hiya,

I'm teaming up with an artist (she's not familiar with gaming at all) to create a point'n'click adventure game. I'm doing the programming and come up with the story and scenes. Now here's the first scene and I'd like to know if that kind of documentation is easily understandable for everyone (for her it seems to be) or if there's some kind of standard for this kind of game. You can also see that I want the player to have a lot more paths to solving a scene that there are traditionally. Is that okay or just confusing?

Scene 1: A brave new beginning

Background image: A brave new world
The Bird flies in from the left, a nice loop and lands on a liana. The Kid walks in from the left, sits down on a stone and unwraps a lunch package and starts eating.
Interactions

• Player clicks in front of Kid, Bird flies here and Kid feeds him.
• Click in from of bridge, Bird hops from here across the natural bridge and Kid slowly crawls across it. -> next scene
• Click other side of bridge, Bird flies there, Kid runs across bridge but tumbles and barely catches a branch or root. Bird has to pick up liana and bring it to Kid. -> next scene

Elements

• Thought-bubble vertigo (Kid on natural bridge)
• Thought-bubble feeding Bird, shown if player is inactive
• Animation Kid feeding breadcrumbs to Bird
• Animation Kid crawling
• Animation Kid falling from Bridge and catching liana
• AnimationLoop Kid dangling on branch under Bridge
• Animation Bird picking up liana and bringing it to Kid
• Animation Kid climbing liana

Easy as pie :)

My personal opinion, the more ways to solve a puzzle, the better. Especially when you make the paths logical.

 :)

I really like your approach of consequences depending on where you click!  :) And the storyboard seems alright, but it's a bit hard to say without any visual queues.

The biggest risk with this approach is the fact that it might cause effects that wasn't the intention, and might be a bit illogical. It could be quite cool though if one mouseclick on the bridge(on either side) caused the character to walk there. If you doubleclick however, he starts running to the spot you clicked. If you run down the hill, you tumble and fall. But if you calmly walk down the path there's no problem.

Cool idea anyway, keep us posted :)

Spatial relationships are really important. I'd use what you have for yourself, to organize and review. Before you send it to the artist, even for a look-over, I'd do this:
  1. Draw crude pictures that show where things are.
       i. Draw a picture for each "state" i.e. each position where the meaning of each click is different, or something is different visually in a significant way - a thought bubble might count.
       ii. No need for transition picture. Though on a second pass you could include one that shows the exact middle as a key-frame.
       iii. Circle each area that can be clicked.

OR:
  2. Send your artist what you have and have her send you the crude picture, then:
  3. You modify the pictures, or the original write-up to clarify changes now that you "see" how it looks.

If this sounds like a lot of work then only story-board a couple of the key "states." After seeing the drawings you can decide which items to add next. The whole point of a story-board is the picture. What you have is a script. That's stage 1.

Even better, you can make the drawings interactive. So if the user clicks an "area" the appropriate (next) drawing appears. This is an excellent way for testing your ideas. I highly recommend it. Doing that will tell you a lot about how confusing something is. You can even get basic play-test data by sharing it on the web and having the program log what users do. Building such a feedback system is worth its weight in gold.