The Sydney Mystery :: Making a Game

                             From
   http://www.twilightsoftware.com/sydneymystery/thoughts.htm

Here are two pieces (I and II) with some thoughts:

I. What's it like to make a complete adventure game?

Step 1. Have some kind of vision for the game and its underlying
engine.  For the engine, I decided upon the simplest possible user
interface and set of interactions. The General Paradigm section at
http://www.twilightsoftware.com/age (halfway down the page)
defined my vision of the engine's capabilities. From a simple
paradigms, complex gameplay can follow if desired.

Step 2. Program an engine.  I coded the AGE Adventure Game Engine
to carry out my minimal set of gameplay, and developed a few
experimental scenes in parallel.

Step 3. Design a game.  I tried a few different ways to write my
script, many of them really formally formatted document. Then I
just wrote the whole set of game steps as small, natural
paragraphs, and it was much easier. The conversations were just a
page of dialogue each.

Step 4. Make art by taking a bazillion photos.  Roam the city,
photograph locations.

Step 5. Film your friends.  Drag them off to strange locations at
odd hours of the day, get another friend to hold the shotgun
microphone, and put the camera on a tripod.  Read a line at a time
to your actor, and have them recite each line at the camera.

Step 6. Spend forever editing the photos, the video and the text
script files.  Bring in an intern or a partner because this is an
amazingly draining process when you're doing it solo. Oh, and
regret never spending a weekend writing an authoring tool.

Step 7. Play through the game again and again.  Fix bugs each time
through, until you're sure there's nothing wrong.

Step 8. Take a day off from your day job and write the entire
soundtrack so that you can get the game submitted for the IGF in
time.

Step 9. Send demos to every budget publisher and agent you can
find, and get politely rejected by each.  (Do the same with your
novel.)

Step 10. Build a subset of the game into a demo.  Hand tweak
everything you can, recompress everything you can, until it's sort
of small.

Step 11. Write a document like this and reflect over the long
odyssey undertaken to build something you're not even sure anybody
will want to play. Be proud of yourself anyway, because you
finished something!

Step 12. Build a mailing list of game news sites, send a series of
press releases announcing new screenshots and interviews, set up
purchasing options through appropriate vendors, distribute the
demo, and finally send the press release announcing that the game
is released.

Step 13. Fulfil orders in what spare time you have.

Step 14. Crack open a good beer with friends, and get on with Real
Life.

II. On the Adventure Game Experience...

I grew up on adventure games.  While the stories and characters
haven't resonated so strongly over the years, the locations that
existed only in the games live on.  From the house on the mountain
in Kings Quest III to the sprawling town with its erratic traffic
in Police Quest, from the pleasant islands of Monkey Island 2 to
the oppressive hero's apartment in Rise of the Dragon, from the
dark cities of the Manhunters to the trance of the haunting worlds
of Zork: Nemesis, and from the lonely spacecraft hulls of Space
Quest 3 to the beautiful world of the afterlife in Grim Fandango,
my mind is filled with these places.  Listening to the soundtracks
of these great games brings all of the memories back.  The places
haunt me.

In recent times I've been talking to some people about what makes
the computer game experience unique and special.  People
repeatedly point out that computer games, particularly
story-driven games, can't compete with movies and books when it
comes to making people truly care about characters, or to immerse
the player in the story arc that must be told.  I agree that we
have not yet reached these goals.

But there is something that computer games, and especially
adventure games, have already brought to us, that no other medium
can: we can exist in, and explore, places.

The memories I have of locations in all these game worlds, of
these lonely and magical places that existed only for me when I
was in those games, are proof that adventure games are something
very special.

I made The Sydney Mystery because I love adventure games, and I
now know that it's very rewarding and fun to create something from
nothing.  I leave the game experience in the hands of those who
play it, and give no direction except, perhaps: to not expect too
much; it's a low budget production after all!  I do suspect,
though, that after playing the game, you will have another world
in your mind, which you can return to again and again in the years
that follow.  I love my city of Sydney, and if I can share just a
tiny piece of it with you, then the game is more than a success.

Pursue amazing experiences.  Life is best lived with a sense of
wonder.

Brendan Reville, 2003



                              - o -