Title: The Vacuum
Author: David Proctor
Release Date: August 2008
License: Freeware; click here to download
Author’s Site: Serious Business

[SPOILER ALERT: This article contains some spoilers.]

You get off smelling clean, looking prim and proper in your red long-sleeved shirt from the bathroom. When you reach the kitchen, one of the other passengers on your ship apologizes for grabbing that last cup of English tea. A few minutes later, you’re back in your room, wondering what the hell those rumbles were, and, after a few more hours, arguing with your girlfriend who could have perpetrated the murders.

And it all started when she asked for tea on her breakfast. And all that happens right here in The Vacuum, David Proctor’s debut AGS game.

The game intro

Just like any other mystery game, The Vacuum holds a lot of possibilities, which, as the author happily pointed out on the AGS forums, is one of the main strengths of the game. There is indeed a lot of possible endings to the story, even more as you find other clues that leads to the murderer. Fortunately, there’s no need to hurry. The game provides more than enough locations to scour for possible leads, and there are no raving lunatics in welder masks and aprons roaming the hallways of the ship.

That’s if you can endure going through the same trail again. Though the game has a lot of locations to explore, walking back and forth through numerous “nodes” and doors can easily tire the beginning player, unless there is something to interact with. The game did provide a way to speed up movement by allowing the player to press the spacebar to cut the walkcycle animation, but this is not the most elegant solution. Surely a ship that hauls various cargo and some chance passengers might make some room for, say, a teleportation device that allows travel between more specific places in the ship, or perhaps ways to reduce the number of corridors and doors to go through.

Meeting the Engineer

At any rate, other aspects of the game are more than enough reason to play it. The animation is smooth and the graphics are quite decent, each NPC being identified with a particular color, including the text from their speech. Since there was quite a number of NPCs onboard, there wasn’t much character development, but their attitudes made each of the characters distinct enough from the others.

Like some of the physical surroundings in the game, The Vacuum’s music was minimal through most of the scenes, except when a particular discovery is made, or when something more critical happens. The author appears to have done away with most of the usual sound effects (clip-clopping of shoes when walking, etc.) and settled with more “spacey” ambient sounds - try listening to the game while Leo Wallace (the player character) is in the corrider between two passenger compartments. Hear that “space breeze”?

What I found surprising was the almost total lack of testosterone from most of the characters in the story. Watch how carefully they manipulate the suspect in one of the endings. See how they discuss so…professionally…how to go about looking for the crew and the other passengers. There are some moments of anger, yes, but once the argument has been dealt with, they all scuttle off to their posts like nothing’s happened. At least the women could be angry.

Or maybe it’s just me

All in all, if you’re looking for a good mystery game that contains multiple possible endings that is not meant to scare, The Vacuum is the game you want to play. Here’s hoping the author will produce more games like these in the future.

Title: Chatroom
Author: TheJBurger
Release Date: July 2008
License: Freeware; click here to download the game
Author’s Site: None

[SPOILER ALERT: This article contains some spoilers.]

There’s always something to be said about objects that allow human conversation, even interaction, without the extras that provide other important clues, such as facial and body movements. Like most other new technologies, a lot of What-If questions accompany their birth, even as they become obsolete, and many of these questions have remained unsolved and unanswered. Yet we play along, as the technology of “chatting”, for example, advances more and people become more isolated in turn.

Chatroom, TheJBurger’s second game, serves to illustrate one of these questions.

Chatroom game snapshot

Similar efforts have been seen elsewhere. Take, for example, Jon Ingold’s interactive fiction (IF) game Fail-Safe, where the player interacts with a dying alien. However, Chatroom goes one step further - it actually implements a simulated Internet chat, with all the quirky and not-so-quirky responses normally seen in a chatroom. Most of the responses were quite spot on, but given that it is a short game set on a post-apocalyptic world where everyone’s pretty much gone, I didn’t really expect a lot from it.

At times I did wonder whether it would have been beneficial to the game’s concept if it were implemented instead as an IF game. AGS’s parser isn’t really that bad, even with the author’s improvements, but I can bet it could have improved more (and better responses might have been added) if Chatroom had been made using either Inform or TADS.

[But then it probably wouldn't have made the One Room One Week AGS competition, which the game was entered on. :)]

Like La Croix Pan (which was also reviewed here), Chatroom can be seen as “one of those AGS experiments,” except, of course, given its implementation time, La Croix Pan remains to be the author’s better work. All in all, I would still recommend playing Chatroom just for the sheer concept. That 10 minutes one this game will be well-spent.

Title: All Roads Lead to Paradise, The Good Dr Ferrer, Jack French and the 7 Dwarfs[sic] (Jack French series)
Author: JohnnyBDesign Games
Release Date: 2006-2007
License: Freeware; click here to download all three games
Author’s Site: JohnnyBDesign.com

Having further exposed myself into other game “genres” the last month or so, I’ve gained a better appreciation of different kinds of game design, and its various methods.* Just before I got back to sampling other game types, I swerved back a bit into the point-and-click adventure genre, but this time I took a look into one of those that are considered “classics” of the Flash adventure game: the Jack French mystery series.

For those who aren’t familiar, players assume the role of Jack French, a detective who looks almost like James Dean but sounds more like Arsene Lupin. He is tasked with solving the mysterious deaths that happen in each of the so-called “webisodes” of the game. Within the game, players are given the opportunity to, of course, question the witnesses and examine the crime scene for any clues that will help solve the case.

Unlike most adventure games made with the likes of AGS or Wintermute, Flash adventure games tend to keep the plot short and have lesser objects to interact with, probably to keep the size small and make the game load faster on browsers. There are less menus to deal with, and inventory menus are made as simple as necessary as there’s usually no need to save games.

The Jack French mystery games are no exception to this. Each of the webisodes’ plots are kept tight and short (”web episodes”). Though there are less objects in each location to interact with, each game is well-clued enough for beginning players not to get lost in pixel-hunting. The puzzles are not really that hard to begin with, and these mostly consist of getting one item after another and using it when interrogating characters, or when getting a quick lab report.

The art is quite decent and almost life-like, which helps lend the game its somber, sober mood. I’m guessing the author’s artist (I’m not sure if it’s the same person or not) used actual photographs of staged murder scenes (fake blood with models, etc.), then rendered to be more cartoon-like for the game. Nudity grew less with each passing episode, but the art became better, especially with the last one, Jack French and the 7 Dwarfs[sic], which featured more abstract art than the others.

Music is well-used only in some parts of the games, contributing a lot to the atmosphere and the tension brought about by the murders. In others, such as the ending cutscenes, music was altogether not present. Take for example, the ones where the actual murderer confesses to their crime. The speech is there, with subtitles and all, but no scary or haunting music. Just the voices of the different characters. (The author finally decided to add music at the end on the last webisode, whch is a bit disappointing.)

Overall, the Jack French series should serve as a good introduction to point-and-click adventures, and should be included in anyone’s list of games for newbie players. Those also looking for a short game to play with over breaktimes should be well-satisfied with this one as well. Heartily recommended for the “quick” adventurer.

——————-

*Or at least I appear to be. It helps if you just play and play these games - whether I understand more design concepts or not, one thing’s clear: I’m having fun

Finally, Tim Furnish has decided to officially declare SLUDGE as open source! He had recently uploaded the source code to Sourceforge, and has renamed the whole bit as OpenSLUDGE.

Here’s hoping all the bugs get fixed once people start tinkering with the engine’s code, especially those memory leaks some authors had been experiencing.

Definitely w00t!

[ Thanks go to Erwin from Adventure Developers for the link. ]

Several game designers are switching to other development systems for their projects these days. Deidra Kiai, aka “Squinky”, has shifted gears from SLUDGE to the Wintermute Engine, as evidenced by her new game Chivalry is Not Dead, which she announced 2 months ago in the WME forums. In fact, she released her second game in WME one month after Chivalry - it’s called Pigeons in the Park, a short game involving two people in a conversation, inspired by Emily Short’s Best of Three.

From the looks of things, more and more aspiring designers are flocking towards existing game engines that are still actively maintained by their developers, and have a more-or-less stable user base. Consider AGAST, for example: according to Adventure Developers, around a total of four (4) released games were created using this game engine, but the site’s last update was back in 2003. Now, even the website’s forum is down. There are currently no visible signs if it will come back again.

I can’t help comparing what’s happening here to the events in the IF community. Most of the IF design tools are pretty much still maintained by their authors, even those like TADS 2 and ALAN 2 that are no longer considered to be “actively developed.” The support is still very active, though, not just from your peers but also from the engine authors themselves. A lot of helpful reference material have been placed for both online and offline viewing. Some users have even stated their intentions of sticking to the tools’ older version (e.g., Inform 6), for one reason or another.

Then again, numerous IF creation systems have also gone the other way - just look at the humongous list over at the IF Archive. Except for probably just a handful, everything else has lain dormant.

That’s the way the cookie crumbles…