I’ve been thinking about starting to write about game design and technical implementation as well, so here’s my first foray into that direction – a brief description of the high level structure of the adventure game for iPhone I’m developing. Like I’ve written earlier, I’m a total newbie when it comes to video game development – and blogging, for that matter – so some of this might be quite obvious.


The game consists of scenes which together form the complete story and game experience. There are three types of scenes: dialog scenes, room scenes and cut scenes.

Dialog scenes are pretty much what’s expected by anyone familiar with adventure games, RPG’s and so forth: the player interacts with an NPC by exploring a dialog-tree by choosing a branch to follow by selecting a line of dialogue from a few options. The usual back and forth; NPC line, player response, NPC reaction and so on. Matching the comic book stylings of the game, dialog scenes display to characters in comic book panels, with text presented in speech bubbles. Obvious stuff.

Cut scenes are non-interactive series of comic book panels, which progress the story outside the regular gameplay. These tie the interactive scenes together, display more complicated results to character actions etc. Cut scenes are linear, the only actions are to browse the sequence forward or return back to a previous panel.

Room scenes are the core of the gameplay. There are two variations of these: full scenes with the player character present, and close-up mini scenes, ones without the protagonist on-screen. These are probably best illustrated by using an example – let’s say there’s a room, which has a door and a panel of buttons the player must interact with to open the door and go ahead in his quest. The room is a full scene; the protagonist can move around, investigate and manipulate objects and so on. When the player performs an action to examine the panel of buttons, the view changes to a closeup mini scene of the panel from the main character’s point of view, where buttons can be pressed by tapping them.

To be honest, mini scenes were not part of my original design plan, more like a fortunate accident. While implementing the full scenes, I realized adding the other scene type would require very little changes to the implementation, while offering new possibilities for puzzle variation and player interaction, in addition to the standard room exploration. A few quick concept tests and some code tweaks later, the two scene types now share exactly the same code. The only difference is that as there’s no player character in the mini scenes, so the actions are executed right away instead of when the protagonist reaches the object in question.

So, that’s about it – all in all, pretty much your standard adventure game stuff. But it’s been an enlightening experience thinking about this stuff from the design and implementation perspective for a change, and interpreting my old adventure game experiences to the iPhone interface and comic book theme. They say studying or being involved in film-making changes the way you see and think about movies. I guess this applies to pretty much anything, including games. I think it’s only natural musicians start thinking about song structure, chord progressions and instrumentation when hearing a tune, painters see brush strokes and techniques instead of just a painting etc.

At least I’m happy to say game developing hasn’t broken the experience and magic of playing video games for me. If something, it’s given me a whole new level of appreciation of the complexity and intricacies of this form of interactive art / entertainment.