FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION
MANAGING INVENTORY
Adventure games have always required the player to pick things up and carry them around until they're needed later. Most games present the player with a visible inventory mechanism—usually a box that pops up on the screen and shows everything that the avatar is currently carrying. A box with a fixed size on the screen creates a natural limit on the amount a player can carry. When the box is full, she can't put anything else in it unless she takes something out first. It may help to give the avatar a natural container in which things can be carried—a backpack, saddlebags, or the like—so that the inventory mechanism is a close-up view of the container and its contents.
The player will need to stop frequently for inventory management tasks, so you should make adding, removing, and viewing inventory items as easy as possible. You could choose to devote a part of the screen to the inventory all the time.
Players find this easy to work with, although it tends to remind the player that she's using a computer, and unless you sacrifice a lot of screen area or implement a scrollbar, the inventory area can't be very big.
Most designers choose to give the player an inventory mechanism that she can open and close on demand. She should be able to do this with a single keystroke or button click. The mechanism should not obscure the whole screen—that feels like a major mode change and tends to compromise suspension of disbelief. The game should allow the player to drag objects into and out of the inventory bag or box quickly and efficiently. The Longest Journey included convenient shortcut keys that allowed players to change the object currently being held in the avatar's hand without opening the inventory box. Allowing the player to manage the inventory with such shortcut keys also means that you won't have to create animations of the avatar picking up and dropping every possible item in the game. Asheron's Call, an online CRPG, includes pick up and drop animations but doesn't actually show the object in the avatar's hand.
Most adventure games feature inventories, but not all. Loom, which was designed to be especially accessible to people who are not already familiar with adventure games, doesn't require the player to keep an inventory. Instead, the player performs all actions in the game by spinning musical spells on a distaff, which is the only object he carries (see Figure 19.11). Although short and considered by die-hard adventurers to be too easy, Loom remains one of the most imaginative and beautifully executed adventure games ever created. (Note, too, the clever pun: The game combines the idea of a walking staff, a distaff, and a musical staff in a single object.)
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Adventure games are best known for their storytelling, but they also offer deeply challenging puzzles. To design an adventure game, your most important task is to create compelling characters and an interesting story and then combine them seamlessly with puzzle challenges to give the player a rewarding gameplay experience. Your puzzles should heighten dramatic tension when the player encounters them and help move the story forward when she solves them. Although adventure game features are now common in action and role-playing hybrids, classic puzzle - and exploration-based adventure still have a devoted following.
