In the early years of personal computers, the adventure game genre reigned supreme, exemplified by classic titles like King’s Quest and The Secret of Monkey Island. Toronto artist Julia Minamata grew up playing this style of play, which emphasizes storytelling and story-based puzzles.
“With an adventure game, you move at your own speed, and it’s more like a book than an arcade game,” says Minamata in episode 459 of Geek guide to the galaxy podcast. “I discovered – as an artistic and studious child – that interactive storytelling was the type of game that most appealed to me.”
Video game journalist Kurt Kalata loves adventure games so much that he wrote and edited The guide to classic graphic adventures, a huge volume that details dozens of different games. It is exactly the kind of book he would have liked to have had as a child, growing up in the 90s. [adventure game guidebook] around like my Bible, although it was mainly about how to play and how to beat them, ”he says. “I wanted something like that, but really about the games.”
The adventure game genre has been dying for years, but the arrival of tools like Adventure Game Studio has created a flourishing indie scene. Minamata is working hard on The Crimson Diamond, a 16-color adventure game inspired by the mystery of Sierra’s murder in 1989 The colonel’s legacy.
“What brought me back to the genre was when I started to see games produced by solo developers,” says Minamata. “Yahtzee Croshaw did Chzo Mythos, Francisco Gonzalez made the series Ben Jordan. This is a person who uses Adventure Game Studio, and that was really inspiring for me. “
And while tools like Adventure Game Studio can help simplify the coding process, there are still no shortcuts when it comes to creating great art. Kalata spent months doing a Monkey Island– Inspirational game called Christopher Columbus is an idiot, but it hit the wall when it came time to polish the look. “Everything that was scribbled on MS Paint and eventually got to the point where it was like, ‘I don’t know if I can take the time to do this without making it a commercial project, and to make it a commercial project that I need good art ‘, ”he says.
Listen to the full interview with Julia Minamata and Kurt Kalata in episode 459 of Geek guide to the galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.
Kurt Kalata in point-and-click games vs. text analyzer games:
“[With a point-and-click game], you have so many tools to interact with the world, so eventually, if you try enough things, you will solve it, and that was a comfortable feeling for me. You could try everything and eventually find it. And the text analyzers in the Sierra games were not particularly good, compared to the Infocom games, which had a better vocabulary. I think if the game was a little more straightforward about telling you what things he understood – and also if you didn’t need to guess about how he decided to call a noun, or if he at least had more synonyms for certain words – it would have been better. “
Julia Minamata about game designers:
“Before the current situation we are in now, I went to Pax West, and I was able to meet Lori and Corey Cole, which was really amazing, and I met Douglas Herring, who was the artist of The colonel’s legacy, which is the main inspiration for my game. Al Lowe was also there, so it was really cool. They were on an adventure game panel together, so I got to see them and have a little chat with Lori and Corey Cole. … So it was really cool to see and go to events to show my game – kind of bumping into people here and there, and seeing people who are still developing [games]. It was really inspiring. “
Julia Minamata in The colonel’s legacy:
“The artists had a lot of freedom in terms of what they were generating. They received some reference material, some pictures of similar houses, but were left to their own devices. With things like King’s Quest, what would happen if Roberta Williams sketched a basic sketch of ‘Here is a tree, and here is the stream, and here is the stone’, and she would pass it on to the artists, who in turn would interpret it to be something more professional. But what was great about The colonel’s legacy is that she didn’t do that. She just said, ‘Go and do the thing’, so [the artists] were able to create this incredible atmosphere from scratch. “
Kurt Kalata on the future of Monkey Island:
“I was involved with the Limited Run project and I know that they expected the whole project to generate some interest in Disney. Disney is so big that they didn’t even know what [Monkey Island] it was, because it’s just ‘an old game from the 90s that people like.’ We hoped that there was enough money generated for them to think, ‘OK, people are interested in this Monkey Island thing, and here’s the original designer who would be interested in doing something with it, so maybe it makes some kind of connection happen. ‘… The stars have to line up. Someone who works with [these companies] have to be a fan of these games. Someone has to care. “