Want to make a Myst like game

#1 I believe you can use Torque however you want, any game style, but you may need to know a bit of programming. Or, just enough to do a few changes. I ams till new myself, but one OTHER thing you may want to check out is Macromedia Director. It's language is very easy to use, and is a verbose language called Lingo, though it's more powerful when used in syntax. It would be VERY easy to build a game like Myst on a setup like that.

Most people use it for slideshows, or interfaces like on a CD-ROM or enhanced CD's by artists. I like it alot, and even has some 3D aspects(using HAVOK), people in my class(the class that teaches this program) have made some pretty amazing looking games with it. I even made a SimCity style game(which I never finished) using Director.

The problem with Director is it's price tag though. I believe it's price is around $1000, but it is a program which you could potentially make lots of money off of by making kiosks, and CD-ROM interfaces for - for Music Artists, or anyone wanting an enhanced CD. Lots.... and lots of things.

One other thing I should note is that since it is such a wide program, in that you can do so much in it, it is not "built" for any one thing, thus it won't be as "fast" as it would be if it were specifically made for that purpose. However, for a Myst style game, you wouldn't need to worry about that aspect.

*I tend to rant sorry lol

Back to Torque though, I myself am still new to it. I just felt that if you are looking for something... that I could give you more choices. Though so far in my use with Torque IT ROCKS! But you _may_ have to take it slow at first and work your way up till you can use it better.

#2 Cool thanks. After posting this director did come to my mind. Another thing that looks good about torque is the landscape thing. Does it generate landscapes and texture them very easily? Modeling that in Maya could take a much longer time. But then I could maybe do that in something like bryce...

#3 Well, Torque would definitely be up to the task. If you look at the demo tour for Torque, you'll see that it already has the necessary camera utilization. You could do it in either style, free-roaming or tracked. Download the demo, play with it, and prototype a couple of rooms in your world and their interaction. If you find that you're banging your head against not having a source license to make changes to the engine, then you may want to enlist the help of a C++ programmer. I can't think of anything in the Myst games that stock Torque couldn't do (though the render level of Myst and Riven is much higher since they were FMV's).

First I think you need to determine the type of game you're wanting to create. I know that it's a Mystlike, but if you're looking at a free-roaming camera, then you'll definitely need a real-time rendering engine such as Torque. If it's a track-based camera with pre-rendered movies, you could use Maya to render your movies, Premiere/Final Cut Pro for adding audio to your movies, and Quicktime VR to make the game (though Director or Flash would be a much better option than QTVR). Since you own Maya, you already have one of the key tools for creating a track-based game that uses interactive videos. All you need is a way to edit in audio and interactivity. You could even use Microsoft Movie Maker or iMovie to do the audio. Then use Flash or Director to do the interaction (I'm more partial to Flash in recent years than I am Director).

But it really depends on your final vision of the product.

#4 I've never used Macromedia's Director or programmed with Lingo, but I have used Flash quite a bit (and Actionscript)... and I think that would be an excellent way to go.

Look at this little site:

www.sonypictures.com/movies/identity/

Click on "enter site"...

It's not the best example, but it's all I could recall. When I visited this site a long time ago, I remember how I was thinking this format could make a great adventure game. Especially if it were a horror game.

You could easily make a Myst like game... Flash has every necessary component to do this... still pictures, movies, animated sprites, music, sound effects, scripting language, etc.

#5 Aha, here's a better example:

www.wickedsmallgames.com/games/s/samarost/

#6 I don't know about the programming end of it, I'd just like to cheer for the idea of making a Myst-like game. Lighthouse, Sanitarium, and Obsidian are some other kickass adventure games if you're looking for inspiration. Jewels of the Oracle is a puzzle game that feels like an adventure game, it would be a good game to investgate if you plan on having puzzles in your game.

I hope you're planning on having a great story and deep worldbuilding, because without those an adventure game can't really succeed at being cool, no matter how awesome the graphics and gameplay are. If you'd like some constructive criticism on your game design from a big adventure game fan you can always email me. :)

#7 Wow lots of replies all of a sudden. About the demo, can you actually use torque with it or is it just that slide show demo with 3 game examples?

Rendering movies would probably easier, as using director or flash since there won't be very much programming involved probably. There's a good chance I'll take that route.

#8 Wow lots of replies all of a sudden. About the demo, can you actually use torque with it or is it just that slide show demo with 3 game examples?

Rendering movies would probably easier, as using director or flash since there won't be very much programming involved probably. There's a good chance I'll take that route.

#9 That's the demo, but you can do a LOT with the scripting. The slide-show demo was the one of particular interest for this project, though.

#10 The beauty of using Flash or Director is that it is *very* easy to get your content into it. Literally drag and drop. So your production pipeline, so to speak, is well established from the outset. Whereas, with Torque, there will be some learning curve, having to figure out how to import/export content into the engine, etc.

The advantage of Torque is that you can have a realtime, dynamic 3D world. However, for a myst-like game, this is largely unecessary. If you want to have alot action as a part of the game, with running around and interacting with the world in a much more dynamic way, then I would consider using Torque, but... if its a purely adventure, point-and-click sort of game, with pre-rendered scenes, then Flash will be all you need.

#11 You will also need platform specific third-party libraries to save files in Flash, I believe. For things like game saves, etc.

#12 Using TGE for a mystlike game would be pointless IMO.
Using TGE with Melv's 2D modification of it, would be really cool though.

#13 That's also another thing, about the libraries. I would want to get it on windows and Mac (that's what I use). So if someone would have some kind of tutorial or anything like that it would be great. Or some name of a program since I have no clue what to look for.

#14 Does anyone have any info for me on making libraries and an application file for this?

#15 Well, we kind of need to know the direction that you're planning on moving before we can offer assistance.

#16 Umm I'll probably use director for putting it all together and making it interactive. Another question. for animating things like water and interactive objects (in still pictures), do you use like a movie for the water, then a picture over it, then a movie for when clicking interactive objects?

#17 When I did a still-pictured game last year, I used alpha channeled animations over the stills where moving effects was needed.

I made buttons in the scene, and when clicked on that part - the "pushed" button picture/animation was made visible, and when it was pulled out or unclicked the same picture/animation was made invisible.

#18 Cool. Do you still have this game so I could check it out? What did you use to make it interactive?

#19 Stefan's example is pretty much what I was thinking of.

One thing that could be interesting is to have your animation on the timeline sync with their movement (which would mean you'd want to have extremely short animations for things like water waves so the player didn't notice much lag). That would avoid the jolting stop (everything stops except for the player) that would happen in Myst and Riven when you'd move around the world. That way it would appear to be a living world at all times.

#20 @Patrick: I'm afraid that I don't have it on my HDD anymore. I stopped developing, as I couldn't get enough art to justify further development.

Early this year my HDD crashed and needless to say, the game went along.

If I were to do it again, I would use TGE as a base - actually.
I'm not a good programmer, so using TGE as a base and slowly building ontop of it would be neat. The GUI controls are really easy when you get the hang of it, and all the above I explained can be done with these.

The only problem I can see with using TGE would be large animations, these seem to swap alot of the harddrive.

Sorry for going offtopic, but in conclusion I just wanted to say that I think this is indeed a very possible genr'e that shouldn't be too much hassle to code.