PointClickPress & The Great Underground Adventure

[pirategaspard]

Hey Everyone,

First, its great to find this site. I think that web games have a great future. There's no other platform that is completely OS independent!

I've always wanted to make video games, but some how I ended up a web developer. After many starts and stops in C/C++ over the years I decided to take the old advice of "write what you know" and in 2010 started working towards making a web-based video game.

I grew up playing Myst, Zork and Shadowgate and realized that this style of game would be (seemingly) be straightforward to move the experience into a browser.  So I've been working on an open source web-based game engine to create point-and-click games or interactive stories for over a year now. The engine is pretty stable and the next release will be beta.
I've got a website up with more info & tutorials here: http://pointclickpress.org. 

My hope is to build a community around the engine where people can build and share their stories or games. I've started a wiki and I am writing tutorials.  I've also started http://pointclickpress.com/PCP/ where people can create accounts and start building without the need to download and install the engine themselves.

Currently I am (finally) building my first game using the PointClickPress engine as a method to beta test it. I call the game "The Great Underground Adventure" and it will be a Zork-inspired game. The game is in "unpublished" status, but here is a direct link if you would like to watch my progress: http://www.pointclickpress.com/PCP/story?story_id=8

I've very much enjoyed the challenge of building this web app. Web app development is what I do for a living, but its always fixing old code, or shoehorning in a new feature. Very rarely do I get to create something new & design it to how I want it to work. If I've had one consistent problem over the course of development its getting anyone else interested in this project. My friends are either FPS console guys who are not interested in puzzle/adventure games, or they are non-geeks.  I think what I'm doing is really cool, and I believe that there's other people who would be interested in not only playing, but creating this kind of game themselves. Its tough to develop in a vacuum and I could really use some feedback.

So I invite you all to give building your own point-and-click game a try. I certainly need beta testers; and the site won't break with just me using it

[DV8]

I think this could even be of great value to real estate agents.

[pirategaspard]

I think this could even be of great value to real estate agents.

Yes! My father in-law is a realestate agent. I've been trying to sell him on the idea of being a guinea pig for this, but he is usually a buyers agent not a sellers. Might post on craigslist and see if I can get a side business going setting "virtual house tours" up.

[pirategaspard]

This week I'm coming to the realization that I'm almost out of photos. I've taken hundreds of pics over the last two years, but most of the locations I've photographed do not have the coverage I need to built a complete area for The Great Underground Adventure. OR I have great areas that just don't connect to the other areas.

So far I've got 2-3ish areas.
The White House I fully mapped inside and out.
The Stone Manor I fully mapped the outside of, and I have a different mansion that I can use for some of the rooms inside the building.
The Seashore & Tunnel area is only a few pics to connect the White House and the Stone Manor, but it looks good and is complete.

I'm certainly out of building photos, and I may have 1-2 more outdoor locations I can cobble together if they will fit into the existing areas. Maybe I was too ambitious, but its not quite the scope I had imagined I would have when I reached this point. I guess now that I have my set-pieces pretty much together I can go back and concentrate more on creating the puzzles (in a much smaller world)

[pirategaspard]

Continuing to make slow and steady progress on The Great Underground Adventure. My goal is to be finished by the end of the summer. I have many locations still to photograph and assemble inside PointClickPress, but I will cut them to reduce scope if I need to so that I can finish on time.  I put up a few screen shots here:
http://www.pointclickpress.com/blog/2011/07/27/the-great-underground-adventure-update/

[Nox]

Great locations (the cat is too visibly pasted there though)

[pirategaspard]

Great locations (the cat is too visibly pasted there though)

Hey I ain't no photoshoppin' wiz kid! (Nor is I a grammar-ologist too!)

Seriously though, the cat is a PNG floated over a jpg. That's how PointClickPress puts items into a scene. Not sure how else I could've composed the images?

I don't think its a huge drawback since its more obvious to the user what is click-able. The cat has very important things to say and sends you on your quest.

Also thanks on the locations. Going to all these locations and getting these photos has been an adventure

[Marek]

Wow, I had such a flashback to old adventure games, just by playing the demo.

This thing is very cool! I think you could easily amass a sizeable community of fans. Have you posted on sites that deal with adventure games?

[Ecce]

Very neat! There were several places where I got "stuck" thought - I would click around everywhere and was unable to back up or turn around and had to reload the game entirely. Eventually I got frustrated and gave up. :-(

[pirategaspard]

Very neat! There were several places where I got "stuck" thought - I would click around everywhere and was unable to back up or turn around and had to reload the game entirely. Eventually I got frustrated and gave up. :-(

Hey would you mind giving me some more info so I could figure out if this is a bug, or just bad UI?
Could you describe the location where you got stuck and what browser you were using?  Did you click on the edges of the image (top,bottom,left, or right)? Did you try refreshing the page? 

Thanks!

[pirategaspard]

Wow, I had such a flashback to old adventure games, just by playing the demo.

This thing is very cool! I think you could easily amass a sizeable community of fans. Have you posted on sites that deal with adventure games?

Thanks! Glad you liked it. I am shooting to be done with this at the end of the summer, but since I'm working on the game engine (PointClickPress) at the same time things are moving a bit slow.

Though its not technically a "PBBG" this board has been the most helpful and inspiring so I've only posted info here. When I'm a little more confident with the code and the game is done I'll def seek out other communities to spread the word.

[pirategaspard]

Small Update: I *think* I've finally collected all the photos I need to finish The Great underground Adventure. Also last week I released an update to the PointClickPress game engine. Officially calling it "beta"!

[pirategaspard]

The Great Underground Adventure is finished!*
Its ready to play at www.pointclickpress.com. Thanks everyone for your support while working on this game!


*guaranteed to be 98% bug-free.


Now to get to work on a postmortem blog post...

[hiigara]

Cool. It's ok to let the player guess what objects he can pickup, but the directions he can take should be signaled with arrows.

[pirategaspard]

yea I struggled with that decision. Currently only the server knows whether an area is actionable or not. The solution I saw was that the client-side would need to know what areas were clickable (and in what direction) so that javascript could show/hide the arrow. Bringing all that info over to the client side on scene load would mean that I'd have to keep track of game-state in two places and that'd just get messy.

[pirategaspard]

My thoughts on what went right and what went wrong on building PointClickPress & The Great Underground Adventure:
http://www.danielgaspar.com/blog/2011/11/pointclickpress-and-the-great-underground-adventure-postmortem/