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The problem with many new adventure games (such as The Longest Journey, Syberia etc.) is that whilst they are strong on plot they are weak on storytelling. The ideas are there but the designers just don't have the storytelling or writing abilities to effectively express them. This results in poor pacing and humour, long-winded dialogues and shallow characterisations. The games often remind me of the sort of stuff that sixteen year old would-be authors/poets produce - they aim for profound, deep and meaningful but achieve pretentious, cliched and shallow.

Adventure games (of the lucasarts/sierra type) are a unique tricky mix between story and puzzles, and many of the skills that are required to create a quality adventure game just can't be learnt in the game industry. If you look at the best adventure game designers they possess talents and professional skills that they gained prior to joining the game industry.

Given talented people to create the media, it's pretty easy to create an adventure game - just not to create a good one.

Mmh, then why helping him later in the game?

Because it demonstrates positive character development.  

Yeah, they are of course very valid reasons to avoid making an RPG/Adventure hybrid, but I suspect that the gameplay systems could be streamlined to avoid many of those problems.

For example, eliminating multiple classes and focusing instead on a single, well defined character complete with QfG-style stats would eliminate a huge chunk of the workload. By using a more strictly defined player character you would make many of QfG's class-specific gameplay systems redundant and therefore make it possible to remove them entirely; in other words, rather than choosing a thief, fighter, magic user or paladin, you'd have (and, yeah, I know that this is a terrible example) Roger Wilco, space janitor, with specific space janitor/scifi spoof related RPG stats.

It does seem do-able with a bit (well, ok, a lot) of smart planning and, as I said, streamlining.

Obviously I can't speak for Brit (well I can try: Imagine I'm wearing a sock puppet on my right hand and saying "Hi! I'm GameDevBrit!" in an unconvincing squeaky voice) but in my opinion, although I kind of agree with you, I think that thematically speaking a Thieves Guild would have felt out of place in Tarna; the place seemed too ordered, civilised and well policed/guarded by the Liontaurs for the establishment of an organised crime syndicate. I do wish that the player had gained access to the Liontaur section of the city at some point in the game though, although, having said that, I also think that showing too much can lesson a game setting's intrigue and atmosphere.

As far as Harami goes, haven't you ever heard the saying "There's no honour amongst thieves"?

1) You already gained significant experience by successfully developing a few freeware Sierra-remakes and, more specifically, in using AGS before developing Al Emmo. Compared to the development of your previous games, what would you say were the most difficult and/or surprising problems that you encountered whilst developing your first commercial adventure game?

2) Many game developers grow to hate the games they have worked on. Partly this is due to the long working hours, unreasonable deadline and publisher milestones (which probably isn't a factor for you), the tedium of completing uninteresting but essential tasks and the sheer repetition of having to work on the same areas of the game again and again (and again...) Did you experience this type of developer burn out? If not, how did you avoid it?

I'd very much like to see Himalaya Studios tackle an RPG/Adventure hybrid in the style of QfG for their next project.

They've already gained valuable experience working on the remake of QfG2, and I know that at the very least GameDevBrit is keen on the series, but I suspect that after QfG2 VGA has been released the team will be too burned out to even consider the idea. Unfortunately.

My favourite adventure game of recent times by far is Ankh. I consider it to be leaps and bounds above tedious, oh-so serious, pretentious and overly wordy twaddle like The Longest Journey, and yet even Ankh features somewhat shaky dialogue and humour that falls flat 80% of the time.

Whatever happened to the great light-hearted and comedic adventure games of the past? Modern adventure games take themselves so seriously - they have substance but no style, and they also lack that nice, subtle Americana (for want of a better term) feel that the best Sierra/Lucasarts adventures had.

The world map in Qfg3 is may favourite method of wilderness travel in the QfG games. I know it was brought back in QfG5 but somehow it just wasn't half as effective or immersive.

I think that QfG4's return to screen-by-screen travel was one of the reasons that I was a little disappointed with the game. In fact it reminded me very strongly of the first game in the series which is my second least favourite installment after QfG5.

And what about digital download options? I'm sure I'm not the only one who is unwilling to pay international shipping costs - it's a big turn-off for me.

Wow, the old cliche was right - great minds really do think alike. (give me a job)

I very rarely meet people online who appreciate QfG3 and asking random strangers in the street about it only gets me funny looks and police attention. I tried whispering about the "Wages of War" whilst wearing a comedy turban to ease the tense situation (being, as I said, a fan of the Arabian Nights) but it made people either run away screaming in terror or try to shoot at me. People are strange and strangers are the strangest.

Despite the EGA graphics, you just can't beat QfG 2 for atmosphere. I've always been a big fan of the Arabian Nights and anything based upon those stories will appeal to me.

Still, all things considered, my over all favourite QfG in terms of character, plot, dialogue, puzzles and polish is QfG 3. An unpopular choice, I know, but I loved the mix of Egyptian and African cultures.

I have fond memories of playing the Quest for Glory games but QfG V was a sad end to the series. The combat system was awful, the real-time 3d character models were ugly and the interface clunky, the balance between action, rpg and adventure elements wrecked, and the story and plot ultimately weakened by being too self-referential.

I felt that the QfG series began to noticably decline in quality with QfG 4 which, although still a strong and fulfilling entry in the series, felt somewhat stale despite the atmospheric setting.

And I'd like to offer up a conflicting opinion :p

I hate it when publishers release countless unecessary sequels to successful games. The trouble with sequels is that they tend to be tired, unoriginal retreads of the originals. I much prefer adventure games that have a definitive, fulfilling ending that ties up all the loose threads. If you absolutely must develop sequels then please don't churn them out Sierra-style.

Nothing decent, I'm afraid. Infogrames is the worst sort of faceless, corporate publisher. It's been quite a few years now but, in no particular order, here's a list..

Actua Soccer 2
Actua Ice Hockey
Actua Ice Hockey 2
Actua Soccer 3
Hardwar
Soulbringer
Hogs of War
Wacky Races
Superman: Shadow of Apokolips
Superman: The Man of Steel
Driver 2
Digimon World
Grand Theft Auto 2
Tanktics
Wild Metal Country
Taz: Wanted

I think that about covers it, but I'm bound to be forgetting some of them.

Thanks for taking the time to answer my pesky questions. I re-read my post just now - Yikes! It was almost a mini-interview!

I'm very interested in the development of creating Al-Emmo. I worked in the game industry for Infogrames/Atari in the past but, sadly, I have never been involved in the development of a classic-style adventure game, nor in the development of a commercial independent game, and I am very curious about your work and experiences.

May I pick your brains about a few other things in the future?

I have a few questions about the process of creating the background art for Al Emmo and I hope that this is the correct forum to ask them in. I'm sure that many people would be interested in reading the answers to these questions and I hope that someone can spare a little time to answer them.

Are the backgrounds 100% digital art or traditionally drawn/painted and then scanned? Perhaps traditionally drawn, scanned and then coloured digitally?

What steps do you take from the initial concept to producing the final artwork? And how long does it typically take to produce a background?

What art materials do you use? And what software (perhaps Photoshop or GIMP?) and art-related hardware (graphic tablets? Which kind?)

Have you learned anything from the experience of creating the background art for Al Emmo? Would you do anything differently for future products? Do you feel that your artistic skills have improved?

How many people were responsible for creating the background art? If it was more than one person then was it difficult to achieve artistic/stylistic consistency between the works of different artists?

Would you say that producing the art assets for the game was one of the most time consuming parts of creating Al Emmo?

Fair enough

Just to clarify my comments, I think that your game is artistically excellent, and I'm absolutely not negatively criticising that in any way. I hope that you have great success with it.

Limiting the resolution to 800x600 can cause problems with LCD monitors (in that the image looks 'soft' when the monitor auto-scales the image to fit the screen - this is a hardware related fact, due to the way the scaling works rather than a subjective opinion) and this does have a significant impact on the visual quality of any game or application that runs in a resolution that is not native to LCD monitors (although this last bit is subjective).

Still, your artwork is fantastic and reminds me of the good old days when Sierra and Lucasarts were producing their best adventure games. I also greatly admire your enthusiasm and your artistic and creative integrity.

By the way, will you enable the option to run the game in a window? And will it be compatible with the Linux version of the AGS runtime?

I'm pleased that you've chosen to use AGS' maximum resolution of 800x600 but even this can seem rather low res and chunky these days - particularly for those of us who use LCD monitors (or laptops) which don't natively support this resolution. On both my laptop and my desktop's LCD monitor, 800x600 looks quite terrible; either 'scaled up' and blurry to fit the screen or in a small 'cramped but sharp' un-scaled box in the centre of the screen, surrounded by large black borders.

I know that many people might say that "it's not about the visuals" and that "low-res is old skool, dude!", but that's not very helpful when you're trying to make a profitable, commercial product, right? For commerical games, visual quality is king,

I can completely understand why you might have used AGS for Al Emmo - your familarity with it must have helped to shorten development time and minimise problems - but, perhaps, it would be in your long term best interests to think about migrating to another system?

I guess, in my own long winded way, I'm asking if you've considered or experimented with other adventure creation systems, for example Wintermute or AGAST, which make use of higher resolutions, or if you're planning to stick with AGS for the forseeable future?