Fundamentals of

Adventure Game Design

Ernest Adams
About the Author
Ernest Adams is a game design consultant and part-time
professor at the University of Uppsala Campus Gotland in
Sweden. He lives in England and holds a Ph.D. in computer
science from Teesside University for his contributions to the
field of interactive storytelling. Dr. Adams has worked in the
interactive entertainment industry since 1989, and he founded
the International Game Developers’ Association in 1994. He
was most recently employed as a lead designer at Bullfrog
Productions, and for several years before that he was the
audio/video producer on the Madden NFL line of football
games at Electronic Arts. His professional website is at
www.designersnotebook.com.

Ernest Adams
Table of Contents
About the Author

Introduction
What Are Adventure Games?

The History of Adventure Games

The Early Days
Graphics Change Everything
Today

Game Features
Setting and Emotional Tone
Interaction Model
Camera Model
Player Roles
Story and Spatial Structure
Storytelling
Challenges
Conversations with Non-player Characters
Mapping
Journal Keeping
A Few Things to Avoid

The Presentation Layer

Avatar Movement
 Manipulating Objects

Summary
Design Practice Case Study
Design Practice Questions
References

Fundamentals of Game Design

Introduction
This book defines adventure games and covers the history
and evolution of these games from text-based to today’s
hybrids. We’ll explore the features common to adventure
games and the gameplay mechanics that define the genre
in depth. We’ll cover puzzle structure, game flow, dialogue,
and language, all of which form integral parts of the
adventure game. This book finishes with a discussion of the
art and user interface that is unique to this genre.

WHAT ARE ADVENTURE GAMES?

Many video games don’t need a story, but in adventure games,
the story is the point, the main reason people play. As the
designer of an adventure game, it’s your job to bring a world
to life—a world in which a story is taking place. Your talents
at creating places, characters, plots, dialogue, and puzzles will
be tested as in no other genre. Because the adventure game is
not limited by flying or shooting or commanding troops in
battle—indeed, it isn’t bound by any particular mode of
interaction—it has the greatest potential for creativity of any
genre.
Adventure games are quite different from most other games on
the market. An adventure game isn’t a competition or a
simulation. An adventure game doesn’t offer a process to
manage or an opponent to defeat through strategy and tactics.
Instead, an adventure game is an interactive story about a
character. This character is the player’s avatar, but he’s more
than merely a representative of the player. He is a fictional
person in his own right, a protagonist, the hero of the story.

Adventure Games
Adventure games are interactive stories about a protagonist character who is
played by the player. Storytelling and exploration are essential elements of the
game. Puzzle solving and conceptual challenges make up the majority of the
gameplay. Combat, economic management, and action challenges are
reduced or nonexistent.

This definition doesn’t mean that there is no conflict in

adventure games (although many adventure games have none)
—only that combat is not a primary activity. Adventure games
seldom have an internal economy. All the relationships within
the game are symbolic rather than numeric. Manipulating or
optimizing an economic system forms no part of the adventure
game experience; this (among other things) sets them apart
from role-playing games.

Why “Adventure” Games?

The term adventure game is a bit misleading because a lot of games about
being adventurous aren’t adventure games—and a lot of adventure games
aren’t about adventures, at least in the fairy-tale sense of going forth to seek
one’s fortune. The reason for the term is historical. Adventure game is really
short for Adventure-type game, meaning a game similar to the one named
Adventure (sometimes referred to as Colossal Cave). All adventure games
are conceptual descendants of the original Adventure, although nowadays
they include many features that Adventure lacked.
The History of Adventure Games
Adventure games have changed more over their history
than other game genres have. Sports, driving, and fighting
games, for example, have better graphics than in the past,
but their gameplay seldom changes much because these are
well-understood fantasies. Because adventure games are
not about any one subject or activity, there is considerable
variation among them. In this section, we’ll look at the
history of adventure games.

THE EARLY DAYS

Adventure games were highly popular in the early days of
personal computers. The first ones were text-only, which made
them inexpensive to develop and allowed great scope for both
the designers’ and the players’ imaginations. A group of
students at MIT, inspired by the original Adventure, wrote a
much larger adventure game named Zork on the mainframe
there. Soon afterward, they converted it to run on personal
computers and founded a company, Infocom, devoted to
developing text adventures. Infocom published games about
all kinds of things: fantasy magic, film noir detective stories,
exploration of an ancient Egyptian pyramid, and so on.
The original Adventure didn’t have any plot; it just offered a
space to explore and puzzles to solve. With minor exceptions,
its world did not change as time passed. But it wasn’t long
before games began to explore the notion of interactive
storytelling, which Fundamentals of Game Design, Third
Edition discusses in detail.
Text-only adventure games have long ceased to be a
commercial market, but they live on as an art form for
enthusiasts who are interested in the power of the written word
in gaming. This field is now called interactive fiction, and a
number of free tools exist to help people create such works. If
you would like to learn more about it, see the Wikipedia entry
on interactive fiction, which includes links to some of the
more popular development tools.

GRAPHICS CHANGE EVERYTHING

As soon as personal computers began to develop graphics
capability (the very earliest were text-only), developers started
to add graphics to adventure games, and the games really took
off. LucasArts and Sierra On-Line dominated the genre; and
from the mid-1980s to the early ’90s, they produced the best-
looking, richest games on the market: funny, scary, mysterious,
and fascinating. Adventure games provided challenges and
explored areas that other genres didn’t touch. Myst, a point-
and-click graphic adventure, was for many years the best-
selling personal computer game of all time. (It was later
supplanted by The Sims.)
The first graphical adventure games came with gorgeously
painted but static backdrops for every scene that looked much
like theatrical stage sets. Players could see a lot of things but
could touch only a few of them. Although the arrival of 3D
acceleration hardware in the early 1990s made it possible to
create new kinds of adventure games, its primary use was for
vehicle simulations, first-person shooters (FPSs), and other,
more action-oriented genres. Adventure games lost their grip
on the public’s imagination, as well as their overall share of
the video game market, throughout the ’90s. But they
continued to be made for people who really like them,
especially in Germany.

Action-Adventures
The arrival of 3D hardware also gave rise to a new sort of game, a hybrid of
action game and adventure game called, unsurprisingly, an action-adventure.
These games are faster paced than a pure adventure game and include
physical as well as conceptual challenges. The Silent Hill and Assassin’s
Creed series would qualify, for example. The modern Zelda games could be
considered another example, although with their levels and bosses, they are
closer to being pure action games. Exactly when a game stops being an
adventure game and becomes an action game is a matter of interpretation.

Many adventure game purists don’t care for action-adventures; generally, they
dislike any sort of physical challenge or time pressure. If you plan to make
your game an action-adventure, you should be aware that, although your
design might appeal to some action gamers who might not otherwise buy your
game, you might also discourage some adventure gamers who would.
Without doubt, however, action-adventure hybrids are now more popular than
traditional adventure games.

The static-backdrop adventure game is still around, but

nowadays it may use scenes created with 3D-rendering
software and ray tracing rather than pixel painting. Myst, the
first commercial game to use 3D-rendered backgrounds, owes
some of its success to its sophisticated graphics.

TODAY
In the past few years, adventure games have begun to
experience a rebirth, driven in part by the arrival of large
numbers of casual players who aren’t as interested in physical
challenges or complex mechanics. Adventure games have also
diversified into a number of different forms:
• ( Mobile device games. On hardware like mobile phones
and tablets, the point-and-click adventure game has found
a new lease of life. Although their graphics and sound
require a lot of storage, they don’t need 3D graphics
acceleration, so they don’t run down batteries too fast. The
Secret of Grisly Manor is a good example for Android
phones.
• ( Hidden object games. While most adventure games use
a variety of different kinds of puzzles, hidden object
games concentrate on just one: finding objects hidden in a
complex visual environment. But it’s not difficult to
weave in a story with this process, particularly anything
involving exploration or investigation. The Blackwood &
Bell Mysteries Facebook games work this way.
• ( Interactive “books” for children. These have been
around for years as PC games, and they often don’t have
much plot—they concentrate more on simple puzzles and
visually appealing environments to explore. A more recent
example for the iPad is The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr.
Morris Lessmore. This title began as a short film and was
converted into a successful interactive book.
• ( Multiplayer adventures. Journey, for the PlayStation 3,
may be the only game of this kind. It’s a wordless online
adventure game in which the player can interact with one
other player on each level, but only via a musical chime
and by moving around together. The player experiences a
story of sorts, but it is largely created by his own activity.
The limited interaction guarantees that the players cannot
say or do anything that is inappropriate for the narrative.
 • ( Large semi-cinematic games. The large-scale adventure
game has experienced a limited comeback recently in a
new form, with games like Fahrenheit (known as Indigo
Prophecy in Europe), LA Noire, and Heavy Rain. Many of
these lead the player more by the hand than the older
point-and-click–style games, offering a richer story while
granting the player less freedom. They also make heavy
use of Quick Time Events, moments in the game when the
player must press the correct buttons immediately after an
on-screen prompt in order to complete a task. Many
players do not like Quick Time Events, however, because
they don’t offer any freedom of choice and add an element
of physical challenge. Shenmue is generally considered to
be the first adventure game to use them.
In addition to these forms, the traditional point-and-click
graphic adventure is still around for particular markets and
subjects. The Nancy Drew series of games has been published
by Her Interactive since the 1990s and shows no sign of
ending. Other genres are now adopting the puzzle and
storytelling features that were once unique to the adventure
genre.
The Replayability Question
At first glance, the lack of replayability seems the greatest disadvantage of
adventure games. Most adventure games consist of a sequence of puzzles,
each of which has a single solution; when you know the solution, there’s not
much challenge in playing it again. An adventure game that requires 40 hours
to finish the first time might take only 4 hours the second time.

To ameliorate this problem, consider making puzzle sequences or challenges

that allow the player a choice of solutions. The consequences of the player’s
choices can affect not only the game she is playing but also the story itself.
The player who chooses to blow up the gate blocking her way might
accidentally hurt someone in the process and be chased out of town. The
player who needs a specific key might have to steal it and be chased because
she’s a thief. Offering alternative solutions adds to the replayability of the
game. Adventure game puzzle design and challenges are discussed later in
this e-book.
In practice, however, replayability isn’t much of a problem. Research shows
that a great many players never finish these games at all; even if the game
offers 30 or 40 hours of gameplay, many players play for only 15 or 20. This
suggests that if they can’t replay a 40-hour game for another 40 hours, it’s
unlikely to affect their purchasing decision. Provided that the game gives good
value for the money the first time around, it doesn’t necessarily need to be
replayable.
Game Features
In adventure games, the player’s avatar visits an
explorable area containing a variety of puzzles or problems
to solve. Solving these problems opens new areas for
exploration or advances the storyline, giving the player
new information and new problems to solve. Exploring the
environment and manipulating items in it are essential
elements of an adventure game. Many players also enjoy
interacting with a wide variety of characters. The more
different kinds of people your game contains, the richer it
will be—a quality that adventure games share with role-
playing games.

SETTING AND EMOTIONAL TONE

Adventure games typically offer only a few gameplay modes.
Unlike sports games, with all the associated team-management
functions, or war games, with associated battle-planning
modes, adventure games don’t need a lot of specialized
screens. Apart from the need to look at a map or the avatar’s
inventory or to examine objects closely, the player always sees
and interacts with the world in the same way, and that doesn’t
change from one end of the game to the other.
In some kinds of games, such as chess and Halo, the setting is
almost irrelevant. Serious players ignore the idea that chess is
a medieval war game or that Halo involves space marines on
an alien planet. They concentrate on the bare essentials of the
gameplay: strategy in the former case and blazing action in the
latter. If the setting intrudes, it is only a distraction.
Adventure games reverse this situation. The setting contributes
more to the entertainment value of an adventure game than
settings in any other genre. Whether it’s grim and depressing,
fantastic and outlandish, or funny and cheerful, the setting
creates the world the player explores and lives in. For many
players, the setting is the reason for playing adventure games
in the first place.
The majority of computer games offer little emotional subtlety.
Games of pure strategy present no emotional content at all;
action games and war games have little more. Nor do most
single-player games inspire complex emotions in the player.
“Yippee!” and “Damn!” are about the limit of it—exhilaration
and frustration, respectively. Role-playing games (RPGs), with
their deeper stories, offer greater opportunities for emotional
expression, but even when their designers take advantage of
this depth, the emotion tends to get lost in a morass of
bookkeeping. Multiplayer games are an exception; their social
context allows for richer interactions because they take place
among real people.
Adventure games are almost always single-player games, so
they can’t rely on social interactions to create richness. They
don’t have intricate strategy, high-speed action, or
management details to occupy the player’s attention. The
games move more slowly, which gives designers the chance to
create a world with a distinct emotional tone. Good examples
from the past and present are Phantasmagoria, one of the first
graphical horror games; Shadow of the Colossus’s vast and
beautiful landscapes; and Heavy Rain’s film noir styling,
which makes it distinctly more than an ordinary action-
adventure.

INTERACTION MODEL
Adventure games always use an avatar-based interaction
model because the designer wants to put the player inside a
story. However, the nature of the avatar in adventure games
has changed over the years. The early games Adventure and
Myst used nonspecific avatars. In effect, the games pretended
that the player was the avatar.

Note
Although it does not use a 3D engine to display a scene, the painted
backdrop still qualifies as a context-sensitive camera model,
however, because the camera angle changes as the avatar moves
from scene to scene.

Eventually game designers abandoned this model so that they

could develop games in which the avatar possessed a
personality of his own, someone who belonged in the game
world rather than being a visitor there. Sierra On-Line’s
Leisure Suit Larry series and Revolution Software’s Broken
Sword games are good examples. In these games, the player
can see his avatar walking around, interacting with the world.

CAMERA MODEL
The preferred camera model of graphical adventure games is
changing. The context-sensitive approach is traditional, but
third- and first-person games are becoming increasingly
common. This section discusses the advantages and
disadvantages of these approaches.
Context-Sensitive Model
Using a context-sensitive model, the game depicts the avatar
from whatever camera angle is most appropriate for her
current location in the game world. If the avatar moves to a
new location that is significantly different from the previous
one, the camera behavior takes this into account. For example,
going from indoors to outdoors, the camera might move
farther away from the avatar to show more of the environment.
In the early days of graphic adventure games, the camera
angles tended to be quite dull, but as display hardware
improved, game development required more artists and the
quality of the artwork improved considerably. Today the
game’s art director chooses a camera position designed to
show off each location and activity to best effect. See Figure 1
from A Vampyre Story.
Figure 1 A scene in A Vampyre Story. The lowered camera
position accentuates the main character’s height.
A context-sensitive perspective lets you (or the art director)
play cinematographer, using camera angles, composition, and
lighting to enhance the story. Use these techniques with
discretion, however. A light touch is best. If you watch movies
closely, you’ll notice that the majority of shots use a pretty
straightforward camera angle. Movie directors switch to an
unusual angle when they have a particular point to make, such
as showing that the protagonist is alone or in a high place.
 The Secret of Monkey Island
The Secret of Monkey Island, now over 20 years old, remains worth studying
because it spawned a highly successful franchise. Although it is ostensibly set
on a Caribbean island in the 1700s and concerns a young man who wants to
be a pirate, the game features anachronistic touches and is played for laughs.
In that respect, it seems a lot like certain Disney animated films—The Jungle
Book, for example—although slightly edgier.

When Ron Gilbert, the designer of The Secret of Monkey Island, started work
on the game, he had already created an adventure game engine named
SCUMM, an acronym for “Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion” (an
earlier LucasArts adventure game). SCUMM represented an important
innovation for graphic adventure games: It put the possible actions on the
screen so players no longer had to guess what their options were, and it did
away with typing. More important for the developers, SCUMM enabled them
to create new adventure games easily without programming them from
scratch each time. Three of the five Monkey Island games used the SCUMM
utility in addition to Maniac Mansion itself and several other LucasArts games.
The Secret of Monkey Island includes a number of other innovations as well,
most notably an insult-driven sword fight between the avatar, Guybrush
Threepwood, and a master swordswoman. Rather than making the fight a
physical challenge, which would have required a lot of additional programming
and would have turned off some players, Gilbert chose to use (and make fun
of) the way adversaries always insult one another in old swashbuckling
movies. When his adversary insults Guybrush, the player must choose an
appropriate comeback quip. Choosing a good comeback gives Guybrush
advantage in the fight; choosing the wrong one forces Guybrush to retreat.
For Guybrush to win the fight, he must choose enough correct quips. The
insults themselves contain clues as to which reply is correct, so players don’t
have to find out by trial and error.

It’s this kind of lateral thinking about the design that separates great
adventure games from merely good ones. The Monkey Island series belongs
among the greats. The original game has since been remade with higher-
quality graphics and was released in 2009 as The Secret of Monkey Island:
Special Edition.

First-Person Perspective
One of the most famous graphic adventure games, Myst, used
a first-person perspective. You may be familiar with the look
of contemporary first-person games, but unlike these, Myst did
not render a three-dimensional game world in real time even
though it used a first-person perspective. The Myst world
consisted of a large number of prerendered still frames that
appeared one at a time as the avatar walked around.
Prerendering made finely detailed and highly atmospheric
images possible. On the other hand, Myst couldn’t depict
continuously moving objects or changes in the sunlight as time
passed, and the number of angles from which the player could
look at things was limited. The world was rich but static.
A real-time 3D first-person perspective gives the player the
best sense of being in the world but doesn’t let the player see
his avatar unless he happens upon some functioning reflective
surface in the game world. This perspective also tends to
encourage a more action-oriented approach to playing the
game, running around without paying much attention to the
surroundings. Because much of the entertainment of an
adventure game comes from seeing the avatar explore the
world and interact with other characters, the first-person
perspective doesn’t offer as many opportunities for visual
drama as other perspectives do.
Third-Person Perspective
The third-person perspective keeps the player’s avatar
constantly in view, as in Indiana Jones and the Emperor’s
Tomb, an action-adventure hybrid. This perspective is common
for action-adventures in which the player might need to react
quickly (see Figure 2).
Figure 2 Indiana Jones and the Emperor’s Tomb. This is the
typical action-adventure perspective.
If the camera in the third-person perspective always remains
behind the avatar’s back, however, the view can become rather
dull and doesn’t let the player appreciate the environment. And
unlike pure action games in which the avatar’s actions and
motivations are simple, adventure games sometimes need
camera perspectives that allow for more subtle situations. In
Figure 3, from The Walking Dead, the avatar is walking with
several companions--an uncommon situation in adventure
games.
Figure 3 The Walking Dead in a context-sensitive camera
angle
The Gabriel Knight games also allowed the player to move the
camera around somewhat (see Figure 4)—as do most of the
better action games. This mimics how a real person can turn
her head to look in a given direction without moving her
whole body.
Figure 4 Gabriel Knight as seen from a player-adjusted
camera position. The Volkswagen bus would not be visible if
the camera were behind him.

PLAYER ROLES
In most video games, the player’s role is largely defined by the
challenges offered, whether as an athlete in a sports game, a
pilot in a flight simulator, or a martial arts expert in a fighting
game. But adventure games can be filled with all kinds of
puzzles and problems unrelated to the player’s stated role.
Indiana Jones is supposedly an archaeologist, but we don’t see
him digging very much. The role of the player in an adventure
game arises not out of the challenges (unless you specifically
want it to), but out of the story. The player can still be a pilot,
if that’s what the story requires, but that doesn’t necessarily
guarantee that she’ll get to fly a plane. And she might be
anything else or nothing in particular—just an ordinary person
living in an extraordinary situation.
A good many adventure games do connect the player’s role
with the game’s activities, however. Almost all adventure
games treat the story as a journey, mapping the plot of the
story onto physical travel through the game world, so the
player’s role often involves travel or investigation: explorer,
detective, hunter, conquistador, and so on.
One way that the player enacts her role in adventure games is
through dialogue choices. Adventure games (except for a few
unusual ones such as Journey) usually offer the player many
opportunities to interact with non-player characters (NPCs) by
talking to them. The player’s choice of approach (aggressive,
polite, joking, and so on) reflects the player’s interpretation of
the character, and it can also change the plot line. The Wolf
Among Us tells the player something about the consequences
of a particular decision immediately, such as noting that she
decided to avoid a fight, or that the other character will
remember that she decided to say something nice.
Be sure that the player’s role is suitable for the genre,
however, or it could be frustrating for the player. Heart of
China, an otherwise straightforward adventure game, included
a poorly implemented 3D tank simulator. To get beyond a
specific point, the player had to use the tank simulator
successfully. This created a real problem; adventure game
enthusiasts seldom play vehicle simulations, and many could
not get past that point. The obligatory action element spoiled
the game for them.
STORY AND SPATIAL STRUCTURE
Because adventure games map a story onto a space, they
establish a relationship between different locations in the
world and different parts of the story. Over the years, the
nature of this relationship has evolved. The earliest adventure
games, including the original Adventure, emphasized
exploration at the expense of story. The game provided few
cues that could give the player a sense of time passing—that
is, of making progress through a story toward an ending. The
game simply gave him a large space and told him to wander
around. Structurally, the game looked rather like the drawing
in Figure 5.

Figure 5 The structure of early adventure games. Each circle

represents a room. S is the starting room, and E is the end.

As adventure games became larger and began to include a

more detailed story, designers started to break them into
chapters (see Figure 6). The player could wander around all
he liked in the area devoted to a given chapter, but when he
moved on to the next chapter, the story advanced and there
was no way back. This made the story more linear, which
made it easier to write and easier to program. If the player
needed to take a particular object from one chapter to the next,
the story would not let him progress until that object was in his
inventory. This arrangement is functionally identical to the
foldback-story structure. In a foldback story, the player has
some dramatic freedom, but eventually his options narrow to a
single inevitable event before they branch out again. In
adventure games, this inevitable event is normally the
transition to the next chapter.

Figure 6 The structure of story-driven adventure games

With the arrival of 3D graphics and the action-adventure, the

stories became more linear still. Areas occasionally offered
simple side branches but few complex spaces to explore. The
space in an action-adventure is structured more like that of an
indoor first-person shooter (see Figure 7) because action-
adventures emphasize conflict challenges (often shooting and
fighting) over exploration.
Figure 7 The structure of action-adventure games

STORYTELLING
Adventure games rely on storytelling more than any other
genre. This section introduces a few of the key features of
storytelling and talks about their significance in adventure
games.
Dramatic Tension
Dramatic tension, which arises from an unresolved situation or
problem, is what holds the reader’s attention and keeps her
around to see how the story comes out.
To create dramatic tension, start by presenting the problem. In
adventure games, this often happens in a cut-scene right at the
beginning of the game. The meaning of the scene doesn’t have
to be immediately clear; mystery and uncertainty may help set
the mood for your story. For example, The Longest Journey
begins when April Ryan, the player’s avatar and heroine of the
game, has been having increasingly vivid nightmares whose
meaning she does not understand. At the beginning of the
game, she has no goal other than to find out why she’s having
nightmares. Later, dramatic tension increases as the player
learns the source of those nightmares and new problems
emerge.

Tip
Remember the adage from creative writing: Show, don’t tell. Set the
mood and amplify the tension in your story using music, well-chosen
color palettes, camera angles, lighting, and architecture. Never say
that something is scary, make it scary.

The resolution of dramatic tension occurs at a moment called

the dramatic climax, usually near the end of the story. Shorter
stories frequently have only one source of dramatic tension
and one dramatic climax; longer stories can have several, of
progressively increasing importance. An extremely long story
can have several major dramatic climaxes at intervals, tied
together by a common theme, setting, or characters. Richard
Wagner’s cycle of four operas, The Ring of the Nibelungs, is
one such extended work. Each opera is a self-contained story
with its own dramatic climax, although some characters carry
over from one opera to the next, and all the operas concern the
fate of the same magic ring.
Because adventure games are usually much longer than
movies or short stories, you will probably want to create
several different dramatic climaxes as well—each one
resolving a current or immediate problem until the last climax,
which should resolve the overall problem of the whole story.
In the adventure game, dramatic tension is created through the
combination of dramatic storytelling and interactive puzzles.
Impending doom that can be stopped only by the player’s
intervention can provide a dramatic point to the story, as long
as the player doesn’t feel as though the tension is contrived.
As an adventure game designer, you can use puzzles to create
a minor form of dramatic tension. However, puzzles of the
types designers usually employ (as the later section
“Challenges” describes) alone are not enough to keep the
player actively interested in the story for the length of the
game. Puzzles present small, individual problems. Your story
needs a larger problem that underpins the whole story—
something that, even if it isn’t revealed to the player at the
beginning of the game, is the reason that there is a story.
The Heroic Quest
The majority of adventure games fall into the category of
heroic quests, each one a mission by a single individual to
accomplish some great (or, in the case of Leisure Suit Larry,
not-so-great) feat. You can imagine adventure games
structured along other lines but will find few on the market
that don’t adhere to the heroic quest scenario. It’s possible to
write an adventure game that is chiefly about the personalities
of the characters (as in Jane Austen’s novels, for example), but
they are not the norm.
Traditionally the heroic quest involves a movement from the
familiar to the unfamiliar and from a time of low danger to a
time of great danger. The biggest, most dramatic climax you
offer the player should be the last major climax in the game
because anything that follows is likely to seem irrelevant.
Remember that the boss enemies appear at the ends of levels
in action games; if you defeat the Lord of Terror, it feels
anticlimactic and rather unfair to have to fight his second-in-
command afterward.
Occasionally exceptions to this structure arise, such as in
stories in which the hero is abducted at the beginning, escapes,
and must return to his home. However, in these stories, the
protagonist’s struggles don’t get easier and easier until he just
strolls in happily. He often returns home to find that things
have changed for the worse and must be corrected, or that he
must leave again to hunt down his abductor.
None of this means that there can’t ever be periods of quiet; in
fact, there should be. In both of J. R. R. Tolkien’s most famous
books, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, periods of great
danger alternate with periods of safety and rest for the heroes,
during which they regain their strength. A long story that
consists of nothing but action will feel unrealistic and silly
after a while.
The works of Joseph Campbell and Christopher Vogler discuss
the heroic quest at length. (See the “References” section, at the
end of this e-book, for details.)
The Problem of Death
For many years, game designers have debated the question of
whether adventure games should allow the player to make a
fatal mistake. Some adventure games proudly advertise on
their boxes that the avatar can’t ever die; the manuals of other
games warn that the player might encounter mortal danger. In
some respects, this seems like a strange thing to worry about.
After all, avatars routinely die in action games and in flight
simulator crashes, so why shouldn’t they be able to die in
adventure games?
The nature of the gameplay makes the question controversial.
In a first-person shooter or a military flight simulator, it’s
obvious that the avatar is in mortal peril all the time. In fact, in
games of most genres, it’s win or lose, kill or be killed by
clearly marked enemies, all the time. Adventure games differ
because the NPCs aren’t always labeled as good or evil, and
their loyalties can change in the course of the story. The game
encourages the player to go everywhere and talk to everyone.
If you tell the player to explore the world and then you fill it
with deathtraps, he’s in for a frustrating time. Nowadays, most
adventure games adopt a “fair warning” approach, making it
clear when an object or action threatens danger and (usually)
offering a way of neutralizing or circumventing that danger. If
you put a dragon in a cave, it’s a nice touch to litter the
entrance with the bones of earlier adventurers. That ought to
get the point across.
Most adventure games supply a save-game feature, so death
isn’t necessarily catastrophic; on the other hand, stopping to
save the game does tend to hurt the player’s feeling of
immersion. Adventure games shouldn’t be so dangerous that
the player needs to save all the time. If you are going to let the
player’s avatar be killed in your game, make sure to use an
autosave feature to save the game at intervals, which allows
the player to restore it later, even if he hasn’t explicitly saved
it. The player doesn’t have to know that the game is being
saved for him; telling him only harms the suspension of
disbelief.
CHALLENGES
The majority of challenges in an adventure game are
conceptual: puzzles that can be solved only by lateral thinking.
The following list of a few popular puzzles—of the many
types available—will help get you started:
• Finding keys to locked doors. Locked door refers to any
obstruction that prevents progress, and a key is any object
that removes the obstruction. Because this type of puzzle
is so common, the challenge for you as a designer is to
give players enough variety that the door-and-key puzzles
don’t all seem the same.
• Figuring out mysterious machines. This is, in effect, a
combination lock instead of a lock with a key. The player
manipulates a variety of knobs to make a variety of
indicators show the correct reading. Try to make the
presence of these knobs reasonably plausible—too many
adventure games include mysterious machines that clearly
function only as puzzles, not as realistic parts of the game
world.
• Obtaining inaccessible objects. In this kind of puzzle, the
player can see but not reach an object, which may be a
treasure or a key to open some door elsewhere in the game
world (remember that this doesn’t need to be an actual
key). The player must find a clever way of reaching the
object, perhaps by building some device that gives her
access.
• Manipulating people. Sometimes an obstruction is not a
physical object but a person, and the trick is to find out
 what makes the person go away or lets the player pass. If
it’s a simple question of giving the obstructor something
he wants, then the problem is really just a lock-and-key
puzzle. For a more creative approach, create a puzzle in
which the person must be either defeated or distracted.
The player should have to talk to him to learn his
weaknesses. These are often called dialogue puzzles
because the player must figure out what or how to ask a
question of an NPC to get the information that she wants.
• Navigating mazes. Use mazes—confusing areas that
make it difficult for the player to know where she is or
where to go—sparingly. Making a bad maze is easy;
making an interesting maze is difficult. A maze should
always contain clues that an observant player can notice
and use to help her learn her way around.
• Decoding cryptic messages. Many players enjoy
decoding messages, as long as you give sufficient clues to
help out.
• Solving memorization puzzles. These puzzles require the
player to remember where something is—a variant of the
game Concentration. She can usually defeat these by
taking notes, but that’s reasonable enough; it’s how we
remember things anyway. The real challenge for you as
the designer is to create a realistic reason for a
memorization puzzle to be in the game.
• Collecting things. The player must find a number of
objects. These may be the scattered pieces of a larger
object, a set of related items (such as 12 identical gems),
or simply miscellaneous treasures. Make the player meet
 challenges to reveal or retrieve these items; simply finding
and picking them up isn’t really a challenge.
• Doing detective work. Instead of solving a puzzle per se,
the player figures out a sequence of events from clues and
interviews with witnesses. The situation doesn’t
necessarily have to involve a crime; you could use any
unknown event. Detective work forms the basis for many
police-procedure games.
• Understanding personal relationships. The challenges
of understanding and perhaps influencing the relationships
between people make up a little-explored aspect of
adventure game design. Most adventure games limit
characters to very simple, mechanical states of mind. If we
devote a little more effort, people, rather than objects,
could become the primary subject of adventure games, and
this would make the games much more interesting.
When designing puzzles, try to allow for lateral thinking of the
players. If there’s more than one way to solve a puzzle, don’t
arbitrarily restrict the player to your preferred method.
Obviously, you can’t build in multiple solutions to every
puzzle, but if the player tries something entirely logical and
there’s no good reason why it doesn’t work, she’s going to be
frustrated. Only play-testing can tell you whether a puzzle is
too hard or too easy, and you can’t adjust an adventure game’s
difficulty by tweaking some numbers the way you can adjust
the difficulty of games in some other genres.

CONVERSATIONS WITH NON-

PLAYER CHARACTERS
From the original Adventure onward, adventure game
designers have faced the problem of how to create realistic
non-player characters (NPCs). Computer role-playing game
(CRPG) designers must address this problem, too, but in most
CRPGs, an NPC’s conversation is defined by the character’s
role: blacksmith, healer, tavern keeper, and so on. The player
doesn’t expect to be able to discuss arms and armor with a
tavern keeper (although the games might be more interesting
and certainly less formulaic if he could). But because
adventure games are interactive stories, players expect the
characters in them to be more like humans and less
mechanical.
A good many games try to sidestep the problem entirely by
setting the game in worlds with extremely few, if any, people.
This certainly creates a mysterious atmosphere, but it suits
only a limited range of stories. Imagine how Rick’s bar in
Casablanca would feel if it weren’t full of people drinking and
gambling. A world with no people seems artificial and sterile.

Note
The most ambitious effort to create a parser that understands natural
language in video games is the experimental game Façade. The
player takes the role of a friend of a bickering couple and can
influence their relationship by speaking to them (through typed
sentences) in plain English. You can download Façade free of
charge at www.interactivestory.net.

A few early text-based games tried to implement parsers that

could understand limited English sentences as typed by the
player, but these seldom succeeded. NPCs either said, “I don’t
understand that,” or gave absurd answers when the player
asked a perfectly reasonable question; this left the impression
that the NPCs were drugged or mentally ill.
In the end, most adventure game designers gave up trying to
create the impression that the player could talk to anyone
about anything and devised the scripted conversation, a
mechanism that became the de facto standard for both
adventure games and CRPGs.

MAPPING
When playing text adventures, players usually needed to make
maps for themselves as they went along, because they found it
difficult to remember how the rooms in the game world related
to one another. With the arrival of graphical adventures,
mapping became less critical because the graphics provide
cues about how the player’s current location relates to other
areas in the world. However, it’s still a good idea to give the
player a map. A few games deliberately deny the player a map
to make the game more difficult, but this is poor design.
There’s not a lot of fun in being lost. If you force the player to
make his own map, he has to constantly look away from the
screen to a sketchpad at his side; that’s a tedious business that
rapidly destroys suspension of disbelief.
The map that you give the player doesn’t have to be complete
at the beginning of the game; it can start out empty and be
filled in as the player moves around, a process called
automapping. It’s also a good idea to give the player a
compass to tell him which direction he’s facing, unless the
map orients itself for him. You can also include the map as an
item to be found in the game, along the lines of a treasure map.
Automapping destroys the challenge imposed by mazes, but
mazes are one of the most overused and least-enjoyed features
of adventure games. Unless you have a strong reason for
including a maze (such as re-creating the adventures of
Theseus in the Minotaur’s labyrinth) and can construct one
that’s really clever and fun to be in, don’t do it. If you strongly
feel you should have a maze, consider making it an optional
mini-game.

JOURNAL KEEPING
Another common feature of adventure games—one that is
conceptually similar to automapping—is automatic journal
keeping. The game fills in a journal with text as the player
goes along, recording important events or information she
uncovers. If the game includes a convoluted plot or large
numbers of characters, the journal can be an invaluable
reference tool for the player. Let her call it up and look at it at
any reasonable time (though not, perhaps, while hanging over
the edge of a cliff or being interrogated by a villain). As with
conversations with NPCs, the journal gives you an opportunity
to define the avatar’s character through his use of language.
Journals are ideal for games in which the player must collect
informational clues, such as mysteries in the Nancy Drew
series.

A FEW THINGS TO AVOID

As adventure games evolved, designers created many different
kinds of puzzles and experiences for the player. Some of these
are extremely clever, such as the insult-driven sword fight in
The Secret of Monkey Island. A good many others, however,
proved to be only tiresome time wasters, obstacles that add no
entertainment value to the game.
Puzzles Solvable Only by Trial and Error
If you give the player a puzzle that has a fixed number of
possible solutions of equal probability (in effect, a
combination lock), but no hints about which solution is right,
then the player simply has to try them all. The Infocom text
adventure Infidel included a puzzle like this: The player had to
line up four statues of Egyptian goddesses in the correct order,
but there were no clues about what the correct order might be.
The player could do nothing but try all 24 possible
combinations and keep track of the ones she had already tried.
There’s not much fun in that. Instead, find clever ways to
provide the clues.
Conceptual Non Sequiturs
This is a variant of the trial-and-error puzzle, a problem whose
solution requires thinking so lateral that it’s completely
irrational. The term describes something along the lines of
“put the sombrero on the bulldozer” or “sharpen the
headphones with the banana.” A few games try to get away
with this by claiming that it’s surrealism, but true surrealism is
informed by some kind of underlying point; it’s not just
random weirdness.
A variant of this is the opposite-reaction puzzle, one whose
solution turns out to be the exact opposite of what you’d
expect. In the original Adventure, the player could drive away
a menacing snake by releasing a little bird from its cage.
Fortunately, at that point in Adventure, the player didn’t have
many options, so he usually found the solution quickly. But
unless you design an entire game on this principle, players
may see it as just an annoying gimmick.
Illogical Spaces
Illogical spaces were a classic challenge in text adventures. If
you went north from room A, you got to room B, but if you
went south from room B, you didn’t necessarily go back to
room A. Modern games use teleporters to provide a similar
effect; the player may step out of a teleporter with no idea
where it has taken her. In such a space, the player simply has
to wander around taking notes until she can figure out the
relationships among the various locations. Unless you offer
some clues, this is another puzzle that can be solved only by
trial and error.
Puzzles Requiring Outside Knowledge
Many adventure games include references to things outside the
game world for comic effect, but those references shouldn’t be
part of a puzzle. A game that requires the player to know too
much information from a source other than itself may be
considered unfair. For example, Haunt offered puzzles that
only players familiar with the movie Monty Python and the
Holy Grail could solve. It didn’t really matter because Haunt
was a game made by a student for fun, but in a commercial
game, such puzzles would be unreasonable unless you
explicitly make it clear that the game requires the player to
know trivial facts. If you want to make humorous references to
popular TV shows, movies, and so on, do them in narrative
events or in an NPC’s conversation rather than as solutions to
puzzles. Beware, though: Cultural references age quickly and
will make the game seem dated after a few years.
You have to be even more careful when developing games for
foreign markets because other countries don’t always have the
same idioms. For instance, the action “Wear the lampshade on
my head” could cause other characters in the game to assume
that the player’s avatar is drunk, which might be desirable in
the context of the story. However, wearing a lampshade as a
sign of drunkenness is an American cultural idiom that might
not be understood in, say, Japan. Again, it’s OK to make
cultural references in your game; just be careful about
requiring the user to understand them in order to win.
Click-the-Right-Pixel Puzzles
A few adventure games with point-and-click user interfaces
require the player to click a tiny and inconspicuous area of the
screen to advance the story for no particular reason except that
particular pixel is difficult to find. This is lazy design—a
cheap way of creating an obstacle for the player without any
entertainment value. Indiana Jones and the Holy Grail, for
example, requires the player to click exactly on one pixel
during the end game in order to duck under a swinging blade.
For most players, this is a tedious and irritating solution to a
well-known movie sequence. Hidden object games are an
acceptable form of this mechanic: Although the player does
have to click what appears to be an unremarkable part of the
background, the game should provide a visual clue that
rewards the player for paying close attention to the artwork. It
should never be necessary for a player to click blindly around
the screen in the hope of finding something entirely by
accident.
Too Many Backward Puzzles
A backward puzzle is one in which the player finds the
solution before finding the puzzle itself. She finds a key but
doesn’t yet know of any locked doors. However, she picks it
up and carries it around with her all the time, just in case.
When she does eventually find a locked door, she immediately
has the solution, which means it’s not much of a puzzle. By
including a large number of backward puzzles, you force the
player to carry around a big inventory of stuff that she has no
idea why she’s carrying. It encourages players to pick up
everything they see whether they need it or not, which is now
considered an outdated mechanic and harmful to the game’s
immersion. A few backward puzzles are OK; a world full is
poor design.
You may run across situations where you didn’t intend to
insert a backward puzzle in your game, but the player finds the
solution before finding the puzzle because it’s difficult to
predict in what order the player will traverse the terrain of the
game. It’s not always possible to prevent the player from
finding the solution first because the solution has to be
available, but it can be inconspicuous—a poster on a wall full
of posters or an object in a trash can. Be aware, however, that
inconspicuous is not the same as obscure or nonsensical. If the
key to a puzzle involves finding a live monkey, the monkey
shouldn’t turn out to be locked in a freezer.
Some games avoid the backward puzzle problem by placing
the needed item into the game world only after the player
encounters the situation that it unlocks. However, this can
cause problems too, if the player has already thoroughly
explored an area and can reasonably assume that the item is
not there; she will not think to go back and look again. It
works better if the item is something that might reasonably be
expected to appear, such as a new edition of a newspaper, new
goods in a shop, and so on.
Too Many FedEx Puzzles
A FedEx puzzle is one that you solve by picking up an object
from one place and taking it to a different place, as if you were
a courier. Of course, carrying objects around until you find a
place to use them is a common feature of adventure games, but
some games consist of little else. This gets dull after a while,
especially if the solution to a puzzle consists only of fetching
and carrying without any lateral thinking or other activity.
(This varies by age group, however; children don’t mind this
as much as adults do, and can actually enjoy the predictability
of FedEx puzzles.) Liven up the game with a variety of
puzzles and tasks. Create objects that have a variety of
different uses, such as Indy’s bullwhip in Indiana Jones and
the Infernal Machine, or objects that are left over from one
puzzle but have a part to play in another.
The Presentation Layer
Adventure games, more than most other genres, try to hide
the fact that the player is using a computer. When
compared to vehicle simulators, sports games, or RPGs,
adventure games offer clean, uncluttered screens. The
player needs to move through the world, talk to NPCs, and
manipulate or collect objects using intuitive commands or
actions that do not interfere with his sense of immersion in
the story. This does not mean that the UI design is trivial;
in fact, it can be harder precisely because you have to
make the experience as intuitive as possible. It’s
comparatively easy to fill a screen with menus that tell a
player exactly what his options are, but adventure games
should avoid that and make it clear from context.

AVATAR MOVEMENT
The movement interface that you design depends considerably
on the perspective you choose. When playing from a first-
person or third-person perspective, the player needs a way of
steering her avatar around the world, as in an action game.
Games featuring context-sensitive perspective commonly use
one of two user interfaces: point-and-click or direct control.
Point-and-Click Interfaces
In this user interface, the player clicks with a mouse cursor (or
taps with his finger) somewhere on the screen. If the
corresponding location in the game is accessible, the avatar
walks to it. If the player clicks an active object, the avatar
walks to that object and picks it up or manipulates it in an
appropriate way. (The section “Manipulating Objects,” later in
this e-book, discusses object management more extensively.)
The disadvantage of a point-and-click UI is that the player can
easily point to areas that aren’t accessible to the avatar
(halfway up a cliff for example). Sometimes an area that looks
as if it should be perfectly accessible is actually inaccessible,
which can be frustrating for the player.
The point-and-click interface is an indirect control mechanism
and was for many years the de facto standard for adventure
games. It makes the player feel as if the avatar is a person
separate from himself rather than a puppet whose every
movement is directly controlled, and this contributes to the
depth of the character. First the player clicks, then the avatar
walks—if she can; if she can’t, she will usually say so aloud. It
works well in traditional adventure games with no action
challenges. However, because traditional adventures are
increasingly rare and action-adventure hybrids have become
more common, the point-and-click interface is gradually being
replaced by direct control interfaces.
Direct Control Interfaces
In a direct control user interface, the player steers the avatar
around the game world, rather like driving a car. On a console
controller, the joystick or D-pad normally manages this; on a
personal computer, the mouse or keyboard steers the avatar as
in an action game. This is now the standard for action-
adventure games, whether in third-person or context-sensitive
camera models. Many traditional adventure games have started
to adopt a direct-control interface also. Grim Fandango from
LucasArts was an early example. This has the advantage that
the game does not have to implement a pathfinding algorithm;
the avatar only goes exactly where the player tells it to.
Some games have begun supporting both point-and-click and
direct control interfaces, allowing the player to choose
whichever she likes, although this is naturally more work for
the developers. A third option, suitable for touch screen
devices, is to have the avatar walk toward the point where the
player’s finger is dragging over the screen. This lets the player
“pull” the avatar along, but the software does not need to do
pathfinding.
Movement Speed
No matter what camera model or user interface you choose,
you may need to implement both walk and run movement
modes so the player can move slowly through unfamiliar
spaces and quickly through familiar ones. If the game requires
the player to move repeatedly through areas he already knows
well, the player may find watching the avatar walk deliberately
from place to place boring. On the other hand, if you offer a
rich, detailed world and your game expects the player to
examine everything closely for clues, the user interface must
make slow and accurate movement possible.

MANIPULATING OBJECTS
Determining how the player should manipulate objects
presents one of the greatest challenges of designing an
adventure game. Typically the player must figure out what to
do with particular objects to solve puzzles and advance the
game. In text adventures, this amounted to guessing the correct
verb. Play often produced interchanges that look like this:
> OPEN DOOR
    The door is locked, but it looks
pretty flimsy.
> BREAK DOOR
    I don’t know how to do that.
> SMASH DOOR
    I don’t know how to do that.
> HIT DOOR
    I don’t know how to do that.
> KICK DOOR
    The door flies open.
Sometimes this was fun; a lot of the time it wasn’t. In graphic
adventure games in which the player uses a mouse, touch
screen, or handheld controller, designers no longer face this
sort of problem but still have to decide how to allow the player
to manipulate objects. The following sections outline some
approaches.
Identifying Active Objects
With the advent of 3D-modeled worlds and powerful physics
engines, just about every object that’s not part of the scenery
can, theoretically, be manipulated or picked up by the avatar.
However, most objects in a scene don’t actually play a role in
the story; they’re just part of the set decoration. The player
needs a way of recognizing the active objects in a particular
location. Text adventures used to print a list of active objects.
Graphic adventures typically use one of four mechanisms:
• Hunt and click. Active objects don’t look any different
from anything else; the player simply has to click
everything in the scene to see which parts are active. This
makes the scene look realistic, but the player may find it
annoying, especially if some active objects are small or
partially hidden. Designers have generally abandoned this
method in favor of the following ones.
• Permanently highlighted objects. The active objects in a
scene appear permanently highlighted to make them stand
out from the background. You can do this in a number of
ways; for example, make them slightly brighter than the
rest of the scene or surround them by a line of light or dark
pixels. The moment the scene appears on the screen, the
player can tell which objects are active. It’s convenient, if
artificial.
• Dynamically highlighted objects. The active objects in a
scene normally look like part of the background but
appear highlighted when the mouse cursor passes over
them. You can, for example, change the shape of the
mouse cursor, have the object light up, or have the object’s
name appear momentarily. It still requires the player to do
some hunting, but hunting is much easier than hunting and
clicking; a quick wave of the cursor tells the player if
there’s an active object nearby.
• Avatar-focused highlighting. This mechanism is
typically used with handheld controllers when the player
doesn’t have a cursor. As the avatar moves around, active
objects that he comes near to are highlighted. When he
moves away, this highlighting disappears. A related form
 is focus-of-attention highlighting, in which the avatar must
face the object, as if paying attention to it. If two active
objects are close together, however, the player may find it
tricky to point the avatar in exactly the right direction to
put the focus of attention on the desired object.
One-Button Actions
In a graphic adventure game played with a handheld
controller, designers often assign one button of the controller
to a generic use or manipulate function. The player moves the
avatar near the object and presses the use button for obvious
functions such as opening a door or throwing a switch; the
player can always count on the button to do the right thing
with an object, whatever that might be. Some touch screen and
mouse-based games use a similar mechanism, such that
touching or clicking an object causes the appropriate action.
Players find such games easy to play because there’s no
guessing about what can be done. However, because there can
be only one action per object, this method doesn’t allow the
designer to do as much to challenge the player’s lateral
thinking.
Menu-Driven Actions
A number of games use a menu to allow the player to select
which action to take and which object to manipulate. This
gives the player a clear picture of available choices, but the
presence of the menu does harm the player’s sense of
immersion somewhat. Locating the menu outside the main
view of the scene will help with this somewhat, or you can use
pop-up menus that appear only when needed (see Figure 8).
The player clicks one of the items to perform the desired
action. This mechanism in effect shows the player all the
available verbs that can be used at a particular time and lets
him choose one.

Figure 8 The action menu in Heavy Rain

Note
You can allow the avatar to carry an unlimited number of items just
for the humor value of it. In Haunt, a noncommercial text adventure,
the player could walk through a haunted house wearing a wetsuit
and carrying a stereo, an antique chair, an oil painting, and anything
else he found.

Managing Inventory
Adventure games have always required the player to pick
things up and carry them around until they’re needed later.
Most games present the player with a visible inventory
mechanism—usually a box that pops up on the screen and
shows everything that the avatar is currently carrying. A box
with a fixed size on the screen creates a natural limit on the
amount a player can carry. When the box is full, she can’t put
anything else in it unless she takes something out first. It may
help to give the avatar a natural container in which things can
be carried—a backpack, saddlebags, or the like—so that the
inventory mechanism is a close-up view of the container and
its contents.
The player will need to stop frequently for inventory
management tasks, so you should make adding, removing, and
viewing inventory items as easy as possible. You may choose
to devote a part of the screen to the inventory all the time.
Players find this easy to work with, although it tends to remind
the player that she’s using a computer, and unless you sacrifice
a lot of screen area or implement a scrollbar, the inventory
area can’t be very big.
Most designers choose to give the player an inventory
mechanism that she can open and close on demand. She
should be able to do this with a single keystroke or button
click. The mechanism should not obscure the whole screen—
that feels like a major mode change and tends to compromise
suspension of disbelief. A good many games use slide-out
inventories that open at the edge of the screen; this works well
for small screen sizes. The game should allow the player to
drag objects into and out of the inventory bag or box quickly
and efficiently. The Longest Journey included convenient
shortcut keys that allowed players to change the object
currently being held in the avatar’s hand without opening the
inventory box. Allowing the player to manage the inventory
with such shortcut keys also means that you won’t have to
create animations of the avatar picking up and dropping every
possible item in the game. Asheron’s Call, an online CRPG,
includes pick up and drop animations but doesn’t actually
show the object in the avatar’s hand.
Most adventure games feature inventories, but not all. Loom,
which was designed to be especially accessible to people who
are not already familiar with adventure games, doesn’t require
the player to keep an inventory. Instead, the player performs
all actions in the game by spinning musical spells on a distaff,
which is the only object he carries (see Figure 9). Although
short and considered by die-hard adventurers to be too easy,
Loom remains one of the most imaginative and beautifully
executed adventure games ever created. (Note, too, the clever
pun: The game combines the idea of a walking staff, a distaff,
and a musical staff in a single object.)
Figure 9 Loom. Note the musical distaff at the bottom of the
screen; this is used for all actions other than movement.
Summary
Adventure games are best known for their storytelling, but
they also offer deeply challenging puzzles and intriguing
exploration. To design an adventure game, your most
important task is to create compelling characters and an
interesting story, and then combine them seamlessly with
puzzle and other challenges to give the player a rewarding
gameplay experience. Your challenges should heighten
dramatic tension when the player encounters them and
help move the story forward when she solves them, while
also providing a change of pace. Although adventure game
features are now common in action and role-playing
hybrids, classic puzzle- and exploration-based adventure
still have a devoted following.

DESIGN PRACTICE CASE STUDY

Choose an adventure game that you believe, from your own
experience of playing it, is an excellent example of the genre
(or use one your instructor assigns). It can be a classic graphic
adventure game or a hybrid action-adventure game. Write a
report documenting why you believe it is superior to others of
its kind. Be sure to cover at least the following areas:
• Describe the challenges that the game offers and any
rewards that it gives for achieving them.
• Discuss the design of the puzzles. Was the reward for
solving the puzzles balanced with the difficulty of the
 puzzle? Did any of them require you to be familiar with
the culture of the designer/developer/publisher?
• How does the designer get the personality of the lead
characters across to the player? Is visual style, language,
or behavior most important?
• Briefly document the interface for the game. Does the
player interact with the world in a direct or indirect
manner? How well does the interface allow the player to
interact, or does the interface inhibit or limit interaction?
• Address the game’s progression. Does it include a growth
path for the avatar? Is the story linear, branching, or
foldback? Support your answer with a diagram
documenting some of the locations available in the game
and the way they are connected to each other.
The design questions in the next section may help you think
about these issues. In your report, use screen shots to illustrate
your points. End the case study with suggestions for
improvement or, if you feel the game cannot be improved,
suggestions for additional features that might be fun to have in
the game.
Alternatively, choose a game that you believe is particularly
bad. Do the same case study, explaining what is wrong and
how it can be improved.
A case study is neither a review nor a design document; it is an
analysis. You are not attempting to reverse-engineer the entire
game but simply to explain how it works in a general way.
Your instructor will tell you the desired scope of the
assignment; I recommend from five to twenty pages.
DESIGN PRACTICE QUESTIONS
1. Who is the central character in the game—the player’s
avatar? What is the avatar’s gender? (For the purposes of
these design questions, assume that the player is male and
the avatar is female.) What does she look and sound like?
What are her personal qualities: strengths, weaknesses,
interests, likes, and dislikes? What sort of vocabulary and
grammar does she use? What are her ethnic, social,
religious, political, and educational backgrounds? What is
her personal history? What is her family like?
2. What is the story of the game? What is the avatar’s
ultimate goal? What will occur at the dramatic climax?
What things must she collect, learn, or achieve for the
dramatic climax to take place?
3. Where does the game take place? What sort of a world is
this? Is the player free to move around these areas
continuously throughout the story, or do one-way elements
prevent him from returning to earlier areas?
4. What other characters inhabit the game world? What
functions do they serve? How do they look and act? How
do they respond to the avatar? Can she affect their moods
and attitudes?
5. How is conversation implemented? What consequences
can arise from conversations? Can the player choose a
variety of attitudes in which to speak?
6. What kinds of puzzles does the game offer? What
obstacles will the player encounter, and what actions will
he be able to take to overcome them? Is this a pure
 adventure game or an action-adventure? If it’s an action-
adventure, what are the action elements like?
7. What graphics technology will be used to display the
world? Two-dimensional backgrounds? Real-time 3D?
How will this affect the look and richness of the world?
8. What perspective will the player have on the game
setting? Context sensitive? First-person? Third-person?
9. What is the user interface for moving the avatar around
the game world? Will it be point-and-click, direct control,
or some other mechanism?
10. How does the player recognize active objects in the
world? How does he command the game to manipulate
them? What verbs are available for each object?
11. Is there an inventory, and if so, how is it displayed and
used? How does the player pick things up and put them
down again? Can objects be combined or used together?
How is this handled?
12. Does the player need a map? If so, will it be static or
maintained automatically?
13. Should the game keep a journal to help the player
remember things?

REFERENCES
Campbell, Joseph. 1972. The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
Bollingen reprint edition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Vogler, Christopher. 1998. The Writer’s Journey: Mythic
Structure for Writers. Second edition. Studio City, CA:
Michael Wiese Productions.
Fundamentals of Adventure Game Design
Ernest Adams

New Riders
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Copyright © 2014 by Pearson Education, Inc.

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Fundamentals of Game Design
You understand the basic concepts of game design: gameplay,
user interfaces, core mechanics, character design, and
storytelling. Now you want to know how to apply them to
individual game genres. These focused guides give you
exactly what you need. They walk you through the process of
designing for game genres and show you how to use the right
techniques to create fun and challenging experiences for your
players.
Fundamentals of Music, Dance, and Exercise Game Design
Fundamentals of Role-Playing Game Design
Fundamentals of Vehicle Simulation Design
Fundamentals of Adventure Game Design
Fundamentals of Action and Arcade Game Design
For a complete listing visit peachpit.com/ernestadams