Thursday, February 14, 2008

My Midterm Project, rev. 2

Being a computer scientist, and a gamer, I'd like to create a small game as my creative midterm project. I also love adventure games, and have played them almost all of my life, so I'd like to go that route. However, there's no point in making another run of the mill game. I'd like to make something that's different in its own way.

Therein lies the problem. Multiplayer has been done. Fighting enemies has been done. Better graphics has been done (see: Myst).

This is where I'm stuck. Maybe I'll do something else. But if anyone has any sort of comment or suggestion, I'd appreciate it.


So I'm thinking about going along the lines of the "there are only x kinds of stories in the world" idea. What about a game where the story (and even sub-portions of the story) are generated dynamically, either randomly or based on the actions of the player? That could be pretty interesting, and offer almost unlimited replay value.

3 comments:

Adam Johns said...

The idea of a dynamically generated adventure game is interesting. In the action-RPG realm, of course, it's a commonplace: all roguelikes do this, but when the maps are simple, randomizing them is simple too.

In adventure games, much of the action/puzzle-solving/narrative is in opening up new areas, new rooms.

So, can you dream up a way of randomizing the map of an adventure game which also somehow randomizes the puzzles which serve to connect locations? Does that even make sense?

Steev said...

It does make sense, and I think that I can.

I've actually written a rougelike or two in my day, (ahh, 9th grade...) but I tend to prefer straight up text adventures. I never did get around to beating NetHack...

Anyway, yeah, I think I can. And the idea is pretty interesting...the problem is how believable the random elements would be. Roguelikes tend to not really have much of a story at all. So it should be a bit more challenging for a text adventure...

Tony said...

When I read your post the game Fable came immediately to mind where your actions as a child completely decided what your character is in adulthood. I think a game like that following the kinds of story idea would have really high replay value as I remember trying fable again and again to see what differences in the game there was with the different kinds of characters.