Adventure games are fantastic fun, but they tend to be a bit outdated. Even the newer ones seem to think that hunting for tiny little pixels in confusing images and combining bizarre objects together is the way to go.
Brazillian developer Pigasus Games thinks it’s high time we play adventure games that don’t force us to bend our minds to the will of some wacky game developer’s specific puzzles, but rather play something that combines emergent gameplay with a whole sandbox of tools to create our own adventure games. So they created Adventurezator, an emergent point-and-click adventure game with its own set of design and creation tools, made in Unity for Mac, PC, and Linux. Here’s what the devs have to say:
In Adventurezator, you not only play an ever-renewed pile of brilliantly designed point-and-click adventures: you actually get to design your own, and publish them too! The best part? You can do that without all that boring programming, or math. It’s all very technical, but (if we had to put it in layman’s terms) it works like a very fancy cable connected directly to your brilliance.
Adventurezator: When Pigs Fly is the single-player adventure game (created with the same tools you’ll get to use) that Pigasus created to show off their gaming creation tools, and it concerns the adventures of Edmund, a pigman who has to find a way to become human again. Along with his sidekick, Zookwinkle the Gnome, he’ll meet Isaac Newton, the Seven Dwarves, and Whovian-style Weeping Angels. There are even three or four different endings, letting you replay the game, making different choices, and finding the alternate endings. Nice!
What really drives this process, though, are the game creation tools. In the Sandbox mode, you’ll get access to cutscene and actor creators, as well as a level design toolset. Here, check it out.
https://youtu.be/G_Jp5gM0qPs
With this kind of intuitive level and cutscene design, it won’t be long before more talented and creative people than us will get a hold of these tools and make some amazing games with them. The key word here, remember, is emergent gameplay. Each object, actor, and environmental tool has its own set of predictable behaviors—orcs fight humans, gremlins explode when exposed to sunlight and water, and so on—that will make designing gaming levels both simple and easily modified.
The project has three more days to go, and it’s only $3,000 short of its $20,000 goal. If you think all this sounds like a great idea, head over to the Kickstarter page and give it a look. Maybe drop a little pledge on them, as well; be sure to tell them Cult of Mac sent you.
Source: Kickstarter
