First Person AGI

[Adam]

Over the last few days I've been thinking.. Why not do an AGI game from a first-person point of view?

The pictures would be drawn from the ego's perspective, and as a result there would be no ego.

How many people would be interested in an adventure game like this?  I've been thinking about programming an adventure similar to a Shadowgate or Dejavu.

[Andrew_Baker]

Please don't.  Myst and its ilk are often considered respoinsible for the death of adventure games.  But if you must, there are better engines for that sort of thing.  One's called Pyzzle.  It's available at www.pygame.org/projects.  Free download.  Yay.

[Adam]

haha.. I hope I didn't cause too many nightmares..

Just hearing the word Myst makes me cringe... I was thinking of doing an old-fashioned adventure like those old great Kemco games, but one thing's for sure: it sure is sad when you think of a game with a good idea (first-person perspective) and then you're reminded of what made the whole genre "die" in the first place.  

Rock on  

[David Smith]

Well, if you think about it, Manhunter was a first person AGI game. Did that begin the downfall of adventure games? Um, when I think of first person games, I think of DOOM or the like. I doubt that would ever be possible with AGI. Moving scenes are just about impossible to do with it. Only small parts via cels can be moved. Still, all depends on what you're trying to do. "Quest" one of the original adventure games, (only available circa 1984 for the Macintosh) was one first person and quite good. Something like that would be very possible with AGI. Does anyone remember a program called "World Builder" for Macintosh in the late eighties. It made great first person games that were similar to "Quest" and other games like "Deja Vu". Wow, I'm taking a trip down memory lane here. Still, I think AGI is best suited for good third person adventure games. Why not take a look at the program Andrew recommended.

[Andrew_Baker]

Well, one of the problems is that it would actually be too easy to make a first person game in AGI.  Flat screens of unmoving components is really much easier than having interactive objects and stuff.

Plus, I used to play Deja Vu II alot, and I never could beat it, but I enjoyed it immensely.  I think I'm going to snag both Deja Vu's off of www.the-underdogs.org tonight (free plug).

But you're wrong about full screen animation.  If you're willing to sacrifice four or five picture resources, you can animate every pixel in the screen.  To see a really crude example of this in action, go to http://userweb.springnet1.com/failrate and download the newest version of Voodoo Girl:  Queen of the Darned (hey, a free plug for ME this time).  There is a scene with a waterfall that... um... sort of flows.  I'm having weird artifacts show up.  I'm pretty sure the code is kosher, but sometimes it works just fine, and sometimes it blows.  However, I'm going to experiment with overlay.pic to see if I can get it to work.  That way, I could sacrifice a group of pictures to get multiple rooms with some good generic animated backgrounds.  I'll put an example of it into Voodoo Girl if I can get it to work.

I'm a shameless exhibitionist, but I love this stuff.

[Chris Cromer]

This may not be as easy to do with AGI but maybe once the SCI Studio template is out it might be possible to do it in SCI which is object orientated. It should be released any day now.