Is anyone making a 3d adventure game?

Just wondering if anyone's working on a 3rd person 3d adventure of some kind, be it Broken Sword 3-style, Grim Fandango-style, Largo Winch-style, Silent Hill-style or whatever. Particularly interested if you have screenshots of the project so far.

Doesn't have to be Blitz, of course, that's why I posted in GD.

http://www.psionic3d.co.uk/projects/ps/perfectserenity.html

I did some GFX for a 3rd person horror project a while back, theres a lot more characters/creatures than you see on there but we cant show you everything can we ;-)

I've seen one or two in the gallery - can't remember names, though.

Psionic, that girl on the last pic kinda looks like that girl in "the ring".. :p

I'm thinking about making one using my Dragonrage procedural terrain stuff, we'll see.

Yeah the girl has since been changed due to the similarity's

I've been playing around with making a third person adventure game similar to Quest for Glory. Not had much time to work on it, though, due to starting to study full time for a new degree.

I hope to get back to it when I have some free time. Which, if my current workload is any indication, will be in three years. :(

totally off topic...
Becky: Your new sig annoys the hell out of me...

@Gabriel... quite far with a Resident Evil /Nocturne /style survival horror action adventure...
been going steady for roughly 12 months now.

There isn't any recent screen-shots (i.e the graphics in the demo on our site were only for the demo for Blitz-Backdrop...not our game) ...

but there are early screens and a very early demo to showcase the system we developed/are using here:

Blitz-Backdrop

a lot has been added since then, such as physics (there are a lot of puzzles that will make use of it) and also a few other things that i think might add something special...

though i'm not going to write about them here LOL...
Iv'e already had two ideas recently ripped from me (you know how it goes...you discuss it with someone you think is a mate...next thing his mate is doing exactly the same app ;-)

While i'm here...i thought i would mention that i'm now looking for a capable Blitz3D coder, to be a part of the team / project as one member has recently left, so if anyone here might be interested drop me a mail :)

There is some info about our project / team that you can read about via our website / forums (the link above) ...
but feel free to drop me a line anyway if you think you might be interested.

Cheers,
Lee.

check www.dead-code.org for an engine specialised in this kind of genre.

@Jeroen ...Wintermute is specialised in 'Point+ Click' genre ...i.e The Longest Journey? which was why the Wintermute engine wasn't suitable for our particular project.
If you aren't familiar with the style of Nocturne or Resident Evil....read here:

Nocturne

Resident Evil3

cheers,
Lee.

Did you know you can turn sigs off in the edit account section now? Ideal for all the kill joys who don't like looking at the same picture 30 times in one thread.

While I am a great fan of adventure games (played pretty much every one under the sun), I've found the 3D ones to be a lot less immersive than the good old 2D ones.

For example, Monkey Island 3 beats Monkey Island 4 hands down. A lot of the interesting cartoony look & feel with distorted perspective used by many adventures doesn't translate well to 3D, and attempts to create this just looks a bit shoddy... And if you don't it tends to look too sterile -- either way it's a tough job to create the same kind of atmosphere in 3D as it is in 2D I think...

(That said, the more adventure games the better!)

Hi,

i also liked some of the 3d ones a lot. The last Monkey island wasn't looking steril, neither was Grim Fandango or Broken Sword. You have a lot of freedom with animations and overall you're free by choosing the camera perspective.

Problem with the 3d adventures so far is the steering. Point and click is by far better than moving your character with wasd. It only takes more time, you nudge into obstacles, it's just annoying. But it's easier to implement... ;O)


Greetings,

taumel

xlsior, well said. I think that the problem is that it takes more artistic talent to make hand drawn/painted backgrounds that look good compared to rendered backgrounds. Which isn't to say that 3d artists aren't talented, rather that it takes less talent to make something in 3d that looks "kinda ok".

I think it depends on the type of game. For example, Nocturne, Resident Evil 1-3, Grim Fandango would not have suited a point and click interface IMHO.

With the exception of Grim-F, these games are more action based (with puzzle solving elements) that are better suited to this type of control system i think.

The fixed/static camera's with the 2D pre-rendered backgrounds, mixed with 3D characters worked very well, IMHO... much better than a full 3D enviroment would have for these style of games.

Dino crisis 1 switched from using 2D-Pre rendered backdrops (used in their previous games...Resident Evil 1-3) to a full 3D system, and had a camera system very similar to the project shown in the videos that Psionic posted.

Certain cameras would follow you...then switch back to a static view. Anyway, in the sequel, Dino Crisis 2, they went back to the backdrops/static camera system.

I think you either like these type of games or you don't.

That said, Monkey Island 4 would have been much better to go with its original point + click system.

Your right that it does take a lot more time (and talent?) to create the pre-rendered backdrounds for these type of games.

We are using 2D pre-rendered backdrounds with 3D characters, and it takes a *very* long time to get the scene's looking just right.

After saying all that though, i think we will see a lot more of full 3D adventure games in the future. The sequel to the Longest Journey will be a full 3D enviroment, and the puzzle solving will be different to what most adventure gamers are used to in the past.

Cheers,
Lee.

Gab, i'm doing a 3d platformer, adventure right now, cartoony style, with a guy from these boards called tiler.

Unfortunately the Adventure market seems to be dieing off. The releases of point-and-click adventures are few and far between, and several of the big projects that were being worked on have been shelved due to 'market conditions'.

I guess doom-clone-of-the-week will sell more copies, so that's what the big studios make... and they are comperatively very labor-intensive projects, so they are out of reach of many smaller outfits to produce.

Opcode: WME can load in 3d characters on 2d backgrounds.

@Jeroen, i know it can :)
Our team considered using it at one point , even asked about a source code license to the engine.

After a lot of contact with Mnemonic (the main dev i think) explaining what we intended to do, we were told
that WME was not designed (or suitable) for what we had in mind. It's a great engine for point+click games though ;-)

I agree with you xlsior... this isnt intended to be a downer to anyone here developing an adventure (3D or otherwise), just rather a more realistic approach to game development.

If i'm totally honest, i think that the traditional First-Person shooter is as dead as the traditional adventure genre is, meaning ... a series of maps with monsters to shoot. Chronicles of Rid@#!* has some great adventure game elements in it for a FPS.

If you're not into game dev for just the money then my advice is to do whatever you enjoy playing.

That's the line between art and business. Would be great to be able to have both, but... :)

cheers,
Lee.

Unfortunately those 2D point-and-click adventures are by far my favorite genre of computer games, so I really hate to see them wither away here during the last couple of years...

I've been tempted to create a 2D adventure engine myself, but due to the insane amount of graphics and such most of those kind of games require, it's unlikely that anything will ever come of it.

I totally disagree. The traditional point n click genre is slowly getting increasingly populair again. We are developing one commercially. I think some people are getting fed up with current 3d shooter/complex game offerings.

Check out our game in progress:
http://www.adventuregamers.com/article/id,433
The demo also shipped on PC Format magazine once.

yeah.. I like the old point'n'click adventures.. :)

Jeroen; haven't your game been in development "for ever"?
I believe I saw a demo of it ages ago... Have you got any release date set for it?

I don't know why they stopped making adventure games. The problem with them wasn't the genre. It was simply poor game design and bad writing. Grim Fandango was really great, but even it suffered from puzzleitis... Puzzles which had solutions which didn't make any real sense and were solved largely by trying every possible option, or puzzles which required split second timing, or puzzles which involved simply waiting a long time for something to happen on it's own, but you didn't know that that thing would happen on it's own eventually and were sitting there trying stuff till the event triggered after a set period of time. The writing in Grim Fandango was amazing, but some sections took forever to solve because of the puzzleitis.

I think the problem is that adventure game developers decided to rely mostly on humor to sell their games, and they did not realise that a wacky solution to a puzzle isn't the only or even the best way to inject humor into a game.

I loved the humour in Monkey Island.. :)
.oO(aarrrr.. n' such a nice game t'was!!)

I wouldn't exactly call it "working on," considering neither of these concepts are beyond the design phase, plus I have another short project I'm going to do first, but two of the more promising game designs I have in the queue are 3D adventure games. Both cross over into RPG territory, but they have very different themes/moods/aesthetics. One doesn't really have a parallel in existing games, whereas one harkens back in a number of ways to old Zelda games (3 in particular.)

I'm a big fan of the old adventures as well, loved the broken sword series, some of my favourites were the interactive movie games such as the Tex Murphy series, Gabriel Knight (didn't enjoy the last one as much...3D from a first person view), Phantasmagoria, Harvester etc, then there is Grim Fandango... arghh those were the days! <grins>

Here is something i think might be worth a read:

The Economics of a 2D Adventure in Today's Market

Jeroen: looks very nice :)

cheers,
Lee

It's interesting to read how expensive it would be to make a 2d adventure using the most conventional methods. Given £20,000 and a couple of years to work on it, I am absolutely convinced that I could produce a professional-quality adventure game.

Coding it would be the simple part. Producing a professional quality script and the huge amount of top quality pixel art would be the hard bit.

You'd live on 20,000 for two years?

In India or Pakistan maybe.

Or China - where I used to live. And it would only take me two years if I worked on it part time.

I'm working on a 3d adventure right now...
I've done some small adventures in the past and now I'm remaking my first one in 3d to test out my 3d adventure engine...
But I don't try to produce anything of professional quality, just because my artistic (and 3d modelling) skills are just plain horrible...
But I can produce a game that you can play for an hour or two...
I want to make a commercial project, but so far I'm just trying to make anything - 3d is so confusing...

I love adventure games! My personal record - 302 PC graphic adventure games (No interactive fiction, no action-adventures like alone in the dark or LBA are included in this number)... Too bad there are not too many good adventures now...

"Project Joe" Demo I played is really amazing, so so fun. Where have all such games gone? Hope it gets finished.

What are you guys talking about? CHINA? £20,000 is $35,000.

I currently spend only $1200 a month on living expenses. I eat out four times a week. I have high speed internet and a decent cable plan. That comes to only $14,000 a year. x2 is $28,800. That leaves me with $3500 a year extra to spend, or an additional $291 a month. Of course I don't have car payments or car insurance payments to deal with, but if I had a crappy car which I didn't need to insure, that still wouldn't put me over.

I still wonder though where the hell all my money went when I was working for Sunstorm. I was being paid $22K a year, which is quite a bit more than the $14K a year I now spend. Yet my rent was $150 a month less, and my internet was $25 less a month. So how did I manage to spend almost twice as much as I'm spending now per month while I worked there? I didn't exactly splurge on fancy stuff I didn't even have any furniture! The only thing I bought while out there that I can remember was a $900 TV with my tax return, and a "3d accelerator" video card that was pre-voodoo and didn't accelerate anything.

Probably a bit more expensive to live in Europe I guess. :-)

I played the demo of Project Joe a while back, and you did an amazing job on that one. Very professional look & feel, great graphics, humour, etc.

Keep us posted if you manage to find a publisher and have a release date. :-?

I spend nearly that much on rent alone, and I live in a low-rent part of the city; midtown I would be paying twice that easily. Damn this city is expensive.

jhoocking:
Actually, around here, the average rent is anywhere from $700-$900 for a one bedroom apartment, but I wanted to make sure I could affod my place on a minimum budget, so I looked around for the cheapest possible places. While my current apartment is pretty fancy looking, being all wood floors and old fashioned doorknobs and radiators, it does have it's downsides, like being on the third floor, having little in the way of storage space, (though come to think of it most apartments I looked at even the more expensive ones have had next to no storage space) being in a smoker's building, and radiatiors, which while looking nice, put out TONS of heat, and I have had to turn off two of them and the third is broken so just constantly puts out steam into my bathroom making it like a sauna when the heater is on, which is whenever it feels like being on because I can't control it. :-)

But it's still a very nice place for the money. When I was in Indianapolis, I had a slightly larger and more modern 1br place with a bit more storage and a decent sized kitchen instead of a closet, and that was only $450, but it's a lot cheaper out there than it is in New Hampshire. A similar, place over here generally costs around $800 a month.

A little digging on your website (no pun intended) reveals that you live in New York City! Well no wonder it's so damn expensive! :-)

Do you live in New York because you have relaitves there, or because you like the city, or just because you've never lived anywhere else? Why not move if the rent is so hideously expensive. :-) Manchester doesn't really have a night life after 1am, and most of the shops close at 9:30-10, but that's only annoying when I'm up at 4am and want dinner and the only places open are Bickford's and Red Arrow Diner which both have really crappy food and are generally filled with crazy people at those hours. :-)

Speaking of the night life, I don't generally go to bars, but I recently discovered a cool little pub called the Wild Rover which serves irish/euruope themed dishes like "Bangers and Mashed" (sausuages and mashed potatoes) and fish and chips, which a lot of places serve, but they serve it in a faux newspaper wrapping in a basket. :-) I decided to try a beer while I was having my fish and chips since I don't usually drink beer because I don't like beer, and surprise surprise, I still don't like beer. I had a Newcastle since it got high ratings online. I wonder if a Guiness would be more to my taste. There's gotta be a decent beer out there because I can't figure out why people drink that vile stuff otherwise. :-)

Oh I know rents are way high here; you'd have to be an idiot not to. Plus, I only recently moved here (in August,) so having to pay this much rent is new to me; up until recently I always lived in less expensive areas. I was just commenting. Y'know, fyi.

I do have friends and family around here (eg. my sister goes to Columbia,) but my main reason is that the job I landed as I was leaving grad school was here. I was interviewing all over the place and I just happened to get hired here. I was hoping to move somewhere around here anyway, plus it's a great job.

That all said, your costs breakdown earlier is still misleading. For example, while I'm paying huge rents, that's still only a third of my monthly budget. Currently my monthly income is basically a third taxes, a third rent, and a third everything else.

ADDITION: And don't put down Bickfords! I went to highschool in CT, and I have many happy memories of my friends and I getting huge slabs of french toast at four in the morning.

"That all said, your costs breakdown earlier is still misleading. For example, while I'm paying huge rents, that's still only a third of my monthly budget. Currently my monthly income is basically a third taxes, a third rent, and a third everything else."

How is it misleading? $600 a month on rent leaves me with $600 out of the $1200 I specified. I spent ... (Ouch!) $477 on food during the month of october, mostly because I eat out a lot just to get out of the house and because my kitchen is too small to cook or do dishes in easily. That left me with $123 for paying my cable+internet, electric, phone, gas for car.... So I may have gone over a little on October, but I've been keeping track of how much goes in and out of my account so I know on average I actually come in a little under $1200. Also, I think some of the money I counted for food was actually $20 here and there which I take out in cash while at the supermarket because I avoid ATM fees that way. So that cash may have gone towards gas, so you can scratch that off the list.

Little by little I'm coming up with ways to save money too... Eating at Friday's is nice and all, but since they are popular they're really expensive. On the other hand there is this restauraunt in a hotel nearby which is not very busy, is very clean and new, but serves fancy dishes which look like they're prepared by Iron Chefs and taste good too, and they're much cheaper. Speaking of which, I'm gonna have to check out more hotel restaraunts, because even when I was up north, I stopped at a hotel restaraunt for breakfast, and the place was super cheap yet really nice. Of course, the food wasn't that hot at that particular place, but it was super cheap and fine dining. Of course that was actually a motel, not a hotel so there you go. :-)

lol @ "Bangers and Mashed". :)

Next time you're in, ask if they serve "Toad in the hole" or "Bubble and squeak", and for dessert, ask for "Spotted d!ck". :P

As for the beer, try a quality European lager instead of that horrible 'cold tea' ale. :)

GIS for "toad in the hole":

Here's the Wild Rover pub website. You tell me if they have any beers you reccomend. :-)

http://www.wildroverpub.com/

No, no, no. He's got the recipe all wrong. :)

Try this:
http://thefoody.com/meat/toadinthehole.html

Stella Artois is known colloqially as "a pint of wife-beater" - drink about ten and then you figure out why...

... I would recommend Leffe.

I live in Newcastle (where broon ale comes from) and I wouldn't touch it if I was de-hydrating to the point of death.

"I live in Newcastle (where broon ale comes from) and I wouldn't touch it if I was de-hydrating to the point of death."

Actually, regardless of whether it tastes like @#!* or not, drinking beer when you are dehydrated is a no-no, because it makes your kidneys less efficient at retaining water, which is probably why people who drink a lot have to pee a lot. :-)

Then again, if the only thing you had to drink was beer, and you were nearly dead from dehydration, with no chance of getting any other fluid in you and no hope of rescue, maybe drinking your last few beers would buy you some time.

Well, there's a couple on that list I've never heard of - Leffe and Hoegaarden. BlackJumper seems to like Leffe, though. :)

As for me, the only one I'd drink would be Stella Artois - despite what BlackJumper says about it, I drink it frequently but don't have a wife to beat, so it's all good. :P If you're not a big drinker, you'll probably find it quite strong to begin with, swifty, but that'll soon wear off. :)

Do they serve beer by the pint at that place, Shawn?