How to Create an Adventure

To create your own adventure, you may use the following steps as a guide line:

1. The story: First, you need a story.
2. The places: Then divide the location of your story into different places.
3. The puzzles: The player needs a way through your story.
4. The details: Now, you can figure out the details.
   • which tools the player can use to interact with the game
   • how the scenes look like and how they are interconnected
   • which regions the scenes have and what the player can do there
   • what objects are given, how they are obtained and used
   • which characters are given, how the player can talk to and interact with them
5. The hard work: Finally, you must create the images, sounds, music, and the like for your game and put them all together by programming the game.

The Story

The story of an adventure game usually has one main character, which is guided by the player. This character has to solve a major task that is known by the introduction or that evolves during the story. To progress in the story, several subtasks have to be solved. The main character has to find objects and hints, change his environment, and interact with other characters.

Popular themes of adventure games are detective stories, where you have to get the thief or murderer, or heroe's quests, where you have to slay the dragon and to free the princess or to save the earth from an alien invasion.

The Places

When you have the story, you will have to map the different places of the story to scenes of the game. A scene may be a single room, a building, a street, a town, or just a close up view of an object. In any case, a scene has to be a logical unit and to contain several regions the player has to explore. All scenes are interconnected to move through the story. Often, a scene as a central map facilitates navigation.

The Puzzles

The puzzles are the heart of an adventure game. The player does not simply walk through the story, but he has to do some work to advance in the story. Most puzzles involve finding, using, and combining objects as will as interactions with other characters. Puzzles should be logical, but not too obvious. This means, there should be a way to solve the puzzle by understanding the story and not just by blind try and error.

The Details

For the details, the story, the places, and the puzzles have to be worked out to a script. The complete game has to be described by the concepts of the adventure engine: tools, scenes, regions, objects, dialogs and their text, and of course all the actions the main character may perform and other events that may happen.

Implementing the Game

The last step and hardest work is the implementation of the game. A very important decision is the style of graphics. You may use rendering, paintings, cartoon-like graphics, or any other style, but all images have to be converted to an image file type supported by ADePT. Also, you have to select the size of scenes and objects. Animations, sounds, and music may be added.

Finally, you have to put everything together and to program the game with the adventure language. First, define the global settings of the Game item and the tools for scenes and the inventory. Then, progress through the story in the same way the player will do and add scenes, dialogs, and objects as they appear in the story.

Have at look at the example games and the documentation to learn the adventure language.