Hello, world! This is the Another Alice Adventure team! This semester we will be working on the continuation project of Alice’s Adventure, and create a cross-platform 2D adventure game creation tool for middle schoolers with little game design experience.
Team
Let’s meet the team first. We are a team of four with two programmers, one artist, and one producer. Here is the line-up:
- Artist: Ruofan Zhang
- Producer: Chaojie Zhu
- Programmers: Xiao He (front-end) and Yifing Shi (backend)
Alice’s Adventure
Building a cross-platform game creation tool is not an easy task, especially when it’s targeting naive users, it requires not only the functionality but also the usability. Thanks to the hard work from the previous Alice’s Adventure team, we are not building the tool from scratch. Last year, the team developed the initial version of this adventure game creation tool which enables the game creators to make some fun games and publish them online.
Researches
To continue the project, the first task for us is to do researches on related topics. There are mainly three fields we need to be familiar with: adventure games (especially 2D point-and-click adventure games), adventure game creation tools and educational game creation tools.
Since it’s a tool focusing on point-and-click adventure games, we need to have a deep understanding of what is an adventure game. Though it is quite an old-fashioned game genre, this kind of games influences a ton of modern adventure games. We are mostly researching classic adventure games like Indiana Jones & The Fate Of Atlantis, To The Moon and Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge, along with a game made by one of our instructors Dave Culyba for his wedding: SADA.
In addition to making adventure games, we are creating a tool to make this genre of games, which adds another layer of complexity. Before we ever start to design the tool, we need to look into this space and find out what others are doing. The tools we looked at are Inklewriter and Adventure Game Studio. The former one is the tool people used to create elaborate stories with branches, and the latter one is a common adventure game engine (which is the top recommendation of the yearly adventure game jam).
Also, the side task of this tool is to teach users some introductory game design concepts. Since code education is growing fast these years, we also spent some time on this field, mainly GameSalad, Scratch and CodeSpark.
Next Week
Next week, after these whole bunch of researches, we will start working on defining our goal this semester and finding out how we will achieve this goal. See you next week!