Game 6: "Adventure Game" Released

Game #6 - Adventure Game - is done! This is our first original game, inspired by an iOS hit game Device 6. Making an original game is hard. It's like trying to find your way from the middle of a desert, no landmarks, all directions looking the same. In retrospect a great game seems obvious, but finding that right set of features is hard. We spent many hours discussing the plot, the puzzles, the art style, and there was often no way to know how well something works without building it and testing in a prototype. That takes a lot of time. Our productivity was one day of effort to make one minute of gameplay, the lowest of all the games we made.

Here is a video:

I am releasing the code with an open source license. The art and the sounds are for your personal use only.

We wanted to make an atmospheric adventure game and sound is very important for creating the atmosphere. We used Audacity software to record and edit the voiceovers and the sounds. Syncing the voiceovers to the text was hard, I got it only approximately right. Doing it well would require special files formats like those used for subtitles.

The organizer in me was not happy with this game. Everything is a one-off: each puzzle appears once, the special effects appear once, there is little that can be factored out into general classes or routines. The code does not have the beauty of simple elegance. But it works, and at the end that's what matters.