Wadjet Eye Primordia - A Point and Click Adventure - Now Available

[kaizoku]

Okay, maybe this is an absurd explanation for why adventure games have died, but it's a pretty good explanation for why my interest in doing another one is low! Primordia reflects design ideas I've kicked around for years and years, even particular plot elements are things I've been mulling for a long time. And the visual design is clearly one that Vic spent years developing before starting Primordia.

I've used to raise this barrier for me as well. To think that good ideas just come out of your head in a snap.
That is really not how it works for most artists.
And you said it yourself, all those blurbs of ideas that happen every now and then, take time to mature and take shape.
DFA documentaries where cool in this regard. When you have an idea, write it down. Put it in the pot and let it brew. If you don't write it down, you'll lose it. And good ideas are hard to come by.
All those years of idea collecting are part of pre-production.

The trick to make the "business" sustainable is to do things in parallel. While you're implementing a project, you keep writing down those new ideas that come by.
So that when you finish the working project, you have a load of ideas to work on next.

It's not that we don't have additional good ideas or interesting art, it's just that we've picked the low-hanging fruit. And even picking the low-hanging fruit, it took us 2.5 years to make Primordia. With a better pipeline and more discipline, and the benefit of experience, maybe we could make our next one in a year and a half. But that's actually a pretty significant investment of time for a genre that -- even at its best -- yields pretty low rewards.

And you already have that train moving.

As best I can tell, the top-grossing WEG games were in the low six-figures. Let's say, generously, we could make $200k on an adventure game, and let's ignore the publisher's cut and all that. Say we could do that in a year and a half, and we didn't have to pay anyone for audio -- we just split it three ways between artist/coder/writer. That would be $44k per person per year. It's enough to live on, but it's not a huge amount of money. And it's not like we'd be developing brand awareness beyond the adventure game community; if WEG tried to release an RPG, they might or might not succeed, but I don't think their name recognition would take them very far, despite years of releasing games.

So the problem with making these kind of adventure games seems to me that you are basically earning at best a subsistence living in a genre that always could just die again. Not particularly appealing!

In the end, the financial side of things does make the call. There isn't much one can do about it. But living where I live (2nd world country), 44k tax-free a year would be a very fat pay check.
But I think WEG is really building up a name for them. Jaesun will agree on this. And I think they're slowly breaking the wall for the reception of old-school indie adventure games.

Making AGS run cross-platform (including tablets) could really be a bubble of fresh air.

Maybe another way of getting at the same point: we've finally voiced all the dialogue in the game. While there's no easy way to do a word count, or a count of the non-voiced text in the game, I can say that there are 18,500 lines of voiced dialogue. That is really ridiculous. Per this authoritative source -- http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2010/02/25/news-tidbits-dragon-age-origins.aspx -- the average movie has 3,000 lines and DA:O had 68,250. How the fuck did we end up with 27% as many lines as DA:O? *mindboggles*

wow! that is fucking impressive.

I think the solution for that would be doing partial voice over, instead of making the game fully voiced.
It's the same direction that PE is going.

- Autonomous puzzle solving mechanics. Like a rune system that gives you various magic spells that can be used in different situations in a fantasy setting. Or a tool box, with gadgets that can be combined and used in a similar fashion in a modern setting, or a separate cyberspace environment with it's own rules in a futuristic setting.

what exactly do you mean by this?
can you give a puzzle example?

 

[ghostdog]

what exactly do you mean by this?
can you give a puzzle example?

The easier way to describe it is with the rune magic system. You combine various runes into spells like fire, ice, levitation, open, reveal illusion etc.

In conjunction the magic can be used to resolve various in-game situations. It's an autonomous gameplay system that can replace the use this item to solve this puzzle, and it can be more interesting. Maybe autonomous isn't the right word but, I think you get what I'm talking about. Such a system can be even more complex by intoducing levels of magic power or an elemental aspect or other such options. In the end you end up solving the same puzzl;e maybe, but it's the way you solve it that matters.

Eternal Darkness (GC) had a somewhat similar system and it worked great there.

 

[Ethan]

http://www.primordiagame.com/
Share your thoughts, suggestions, and ideas here.

 

[Manny]

MRY:

Thank you for your answer. After reading it and the really interesting Codex interview I´ll definitely buy the game on day one. I have some comments regarding your answer.

The cursor displays a tooltip / caption whenever it is over a hotspot. That allows us to have hotspot that blend more elegantly into the background, rather than making them stand out. Primordia isn't a hidden object game, after all! Once the cursor is over a hotspot, left click interacts, right click examines. This is the interface method used in Beneath A Steel Sky.

I’m ok with a cursor like BASS. My main concern is with interfaces that tell you what you have to do on each hotspot. For example, the cursor in Gray Matter. Don’t know if you have played it, but it informs you whether you have to use an item on it or not.

Obviously, you have a decent variety of tools in the inventory that you can bring to bear on the hotspots as well. As much as is reasonably possible for one overworked person, I've tried to have custom responses to all the things you could -- so, for example, using the plasma torch on the protagonist's holy book returns as a response that it would be sacrilege, whereas using the plasma torch on the astronomical manuals aboard the ship returns a response, from the sidekick, that things are dystopian enough without bookburning.

That’s excellent. In fact, it’s one of the things that make me think that Edna & Harvey is one of the best recent adventure games. It really ads to the interaction with the world and makes trying all kinds of things fun. It’s a shame most games don’t do that. I think it is because of costs on voices, but I’m not sure. Could you shed some light on it as a designer?

I also find interesting what you say (in the interview) about puzzles having different ways to be solved. But I specially like the idea of a hint system as long as it is used to avoid easy puzzles. And after reading: “The alternative, I suppose, would be to have stupidly easy puzzles, but to hell with that”, I hope the puzzles live up to my expectations and that I can find those “Eureka” moments.

There was a time, when adventure games first when to mouse interface, that I felt like more interaction options were better. But I don't really think that's the case. As long as you design your hotspots reasonably, the player will only have one intent when interacting with them.

[…]

Some games call for a large "verb set" for the naked cursor. But even then, I think I would probably have left click automatically operate as the least-intrusive interaction posible. So if you're a thief character, and you left click on a shopkeeper, the game would parse that as "talk." I'd have some special icon on the toolbar "thief skills" or something that you could use on the shopkeeper if you wanted to pick his pockets. And if you wanted to threaten him, you'd use the dirk in your inventory.

The reason for this is that, as much as possible, interface shouldn't stand between the player and the game; instead, it should pull the play into the game. Having a verb coin, or having the bottom third of your screen occupied by verbs for sentence construction, or requiring the player to go to the toolbar on top for every mundane interaction -- all that just slows the player down. It's not about immersion in the sense of "feeling like you're the protagonist"; it's about that kind of trance state that you fall into in a really good FPS, RTS, or side-scroller. (Super Mario World is the best example of this, IMHO. You utterly forget that you're controlling anything with your hands as you play; or, I do, anyway.)

Well, I can’t disagree with you regarding the “presentation” of the actions. But what I don’t like is that now normally you have only two types of interactions: see, and use and take. It’s true that even in games with the “verb set”, at the end each hotspot tends to accept only one action. But the fact that you can select between more actions is one of the ways to “open” the possibilites to solve a puzzle. If you only have two actions, you can even solve some of them without noticing. Obviously, that also depends on the design of the puzzles. I remember that the second season of Sam & Max, the only really great game of Telltale in my opinion (well a couple of episodes of the first season are also really good, and they have some nice ideas here and there), has some nice puzzles, and, even though you have only one action for all, you could get stuck if you don’t know how to solve them. But, in the end, having more possibilities, in my opinion, is better that having only two.

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I haven't played it. I tried WW, Deponia, A New Beginning, Lost Horizon, So Blonde (tbh I don't think they are all by Daedlic but it's all the same to me). And that new DSA adventure for like 5 mins before it dawned on me that it's likely the same crap in a different setting.

I haven’t played So Blonde, but Lost Horizon is one of the worse games I’ve played. I uninstalled it at the third chapter or something like that. The same happened with Black Mirror 2. With Lost Horizon I really felt, for the first time, the stupidity behind the “cinematics”. Not even Gabriel Knight 2 (a game I like), with its FMV, has less interactions. But if you can, try Edna and Harvey: the Breakout. Here is an accurate review of the game. I’m going to try Deponia nevertheless, only because Jan Müller‑Michaelis is again the main force behind it.

 

[MRY]

Whew, three really engaging posts to try to reply to. Here goes:

@ ghostdog: Your theory of adventure game decline is better than the one I was floating. Your idea for energizing the genre is a good one, but I'm not sure how practical it is. To some extent, the QFG series has some of what you're talking about. And possibly also the Blade Runner adventure game, which had perhaps not "autonomous" puzzles in the way you're using the word, but at least something like a social-physics engine, i.e., the way you interacted with characters didn't depend on following one of several paths premade by the designer so much as just trying things out in a reactive way. But in general, I think what you're talking about would both considerably increase the cost of design and also reduce the hand-crafted quality that (to me) is so appealing about adventure games.

One other reason why I think adventure games fell by the wayside, incidentally, is that for a while they were both (1) the primary if not exclusive linear story-telling games, and (2) the most visually advanced games on the market. As jRPGs gained in popularity and availability, and as Western cRPGs became more user-friendly (or, in local parlance, dumbed down), and as stories began to play a large role in "action-adventure" games, this eroded if not destroyed adventure games' advantage on #1. And FPS games, space sims, etc. all took over in the graphics department.

@ kaizoku: You're quite right, and of course I don't stop writing stuff down. I've been designing the space RPG in tandem with developing Primordia. (Alas, in the time that I started on it, Mass Effect, Flotilla, FTL, and Star Command all swooped in and preempted me. Now my game will seem totally same-y!) But even still, that RPG is drawing upon years and years of thought and reflection, and several years of spending at least half of my pleasure reading on space opera fiction to make sure I had read everything in the genre. After that, there are other projects where I have comparably many years of steam built up -- but each is quite different from the next. If I did a second adventure game, by contrast, I'd just be using second-tier ideas that didn't make it into Primordia.

That said, Vic and I threw around ideas for this adventure game called R3D PLAN3T (Russian backwards Es) that was pretty awesome. The idea is that it's set in the 1960s when Russia was contemplating a trip to Mars. You can play as any of the five crew members aboard the ship, who all begin to go insane Solaris-style. The game starts with aliens boarding the ship to kill you, then flashes back to how the mission went to hell, and then ends with a big twist. We had all sorts of neat ideas in it and did a lot of research into period-technology and cultural issues in the Soviet Union. Ah, fuck it, what am I saying? I probably have like 10 more adventure games I'd love to make. But it almost certainly won't happen.

Also, the made-up $44k number wasn't tax free. Of course, it was made up, so who cares? :D

@ manny: I fear the puzzles will disappoint! I do think that we have a few really good ones, but they're really not as tough as they could be. Sadly, I think the best ones are in the first half of the game. I haven't played Gray Matter, and I do sort of agree with your point about the puzzles solving themselves. I don't think Primordia works that way because there are so many inventory items. I want to say you can have maybe like 15 in your inventory at one point, depending on how you play. And most one-click environmental puzzles are solved by using an item on a hotspot, not by using the hotspot, so the concern you're voicing shouldn't be a problem. I hope! :/

In terms of the Edna & Harvey question -- it may be a voice acting issue, I'm not sure. When I wrote the story for Kohan II, TimeGate insisted on cutting 1/3 of the words in order to save in VO costs. (If you Google reviews of it, you may see words things "disjointed" "jumps around" or "confusing" thrown at the ensuing debacle.) But that's the only place I've seen that attitude. From a writing standpoint, though, it's quite difficult, in part because it can be a bit of a black hole. I thought I was anticipating everything, and then the testers came up with dozens of interactions that -- by the same standard I'd been applying -- could use custom quips. The level of responsiveness is pretty high in Primordia, but that's only because we had a lot of time to work on it and I write fast.

 

[kaizoku]

I probably have like 10 more adventure games I'd love to make. But it almost certainly won't happen.

That sucks.
Maybe you can adapt those ideas and instead of a pure adventure game, you can game an RPG-adventure hybrid.

 

[MRY]

I don't think it particularly sucks. Maybe it's because I'm creeping toward middle age, but I no longer think of life as providing time and space for every single one of my aspirations. You need to perform triage, or I do, anyway. Writing is only one category of my major aspirations (family, law, and teaching being others); within the category of writing, game writing is only one subcategory (a novel and a screenplay being others; I've already done my share of stories and poems); within the subcategory of game writing, adventure game writing is only one sub-subcategory (I also want to do my space game, a couple other types of RPGs, a "Metroidvania," and -- of all things! -- a wrestling game). As much as I would like to do ten adventure games, I've already scratched the adventure-game itch, so I've got to turn to other aspirations.

In terms of recycling or repurposing ideas . . . . To some extent that's possible, but generally speaking gameplay, narrative, and setting all grow together for me when thinking about a game concept. To take R3D PLAN3T, for example, the game arose from wanting to have a small geographic space with small population so that Vic and I could try to semi-plausibly model the characters' behavior (i.e., they'd have schedules and would do things autonomously even when you weren't watching them) without having to be experts on AI. That led to a small spaceship. Then we had Vic's interest in 1960s technology and my interest in Russian history. At the time, I was reading about the first woman in space (a Russian), and that played into things, too. I joked that we could call the game "Red Planet," and then discovered that (a) there had been a planned Soviet trip to Mars and (b) there was a Soviet pulp scifi novel, Aelita, set on Mars. (Of course, I had read Solaris, too.) So I started thinking about this -- how could you tell the story of a trip to Mars in a fun way, given how long it would take? I had the idea that basically the crew would be put into induced-comas in lead caskets (to protect from radiation) and woken up every certain number of days to make sure that things are okay on the ship. That way, we could depict the whole trip in the course of a short game. The basic action of a space ship game like this is inevitable (see Event Horizon, Sunshine, Solaris, etc.) -- everyone has to start to go crazy. But why? Well, I had a really clever idea for that, and for how the Russians could actually pull off a mission to Mars in the 1960s. (And no, it's not alien-related!) Then I started thinking about crew members, etc. Meanwhile, Vic researched and pulled together a lot of gonzo Russian tech from the era, and we started spitballing puzzles that would involve that tech.

So I'm not really sure that material from R3D PLAN3T could be repurposed into anything else. It all seems inextricably intertwined with the original goal of a small, confined space for an adventure game with autonomous NPCs. I mean, maybe you could salvage something for an RPG; but it would be so much better to just let the RPG's ideas flow from its gameplay, narrative, and setting rather than trying to transplant them.

 

[Joff1981]

Update from WEG about pre-orders:

So when can I buy it?
We plan on starting the usual pre-order hoopla in about two weeks. We'll give you further details as we get closer to launch.

 

[Jaesun]

Dave Gilbert ‏@WadjetEyeGames
Setting up the website for the Primordia pre-order launch tomorrow.



Fuck yes. <3

 

[MRY]

Launch trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YvWQi_5fsw

Preorders now available:
http://www.wadjeteyegames.com/primordia-pre-order.html

 

[Jaesun]

Dave Gilbert ‏@WadjetEyeGames
So you may have heard that Steam is not taking Primordia. We're going the Greenlight route. Vote for it here!
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=108108057

 

[kaizoku]

how about GOG?

 

[Jaesun]

It makes more sense they do their own pre-order sale first (as they get full profits from it as well as offering boxed editions). Then I assume GOG comes next.

 

[kaizoku]

MRY

Will the DVD edition include some sort of paper booklet?

 

[MRY]

Still working on paper booklet. Not sure what it would necessarily contain -- maybe Crispin's Log, the poem from the website, some artwork. We might do a poster instead. Or maybe just a PDF on the CD. It's really not in my hands, though of course I'd love the maximum amount of "feelies."

GOG release will be next week I believe. We do better if you buy through WEG and I believe that you'll get GOG and Steam keys, but not 100% sure on GOG key -- dunno if that's how GOG works.

 

[udm]

Thanks MRY
I asked Dave about it too, and his reply was 'I can only assume so! It depends on GoG.' Since recent indie titles like Defender's Quest and Resonance come with GOG gift codes if you pre-order them (forgot if I got a code with the latest Blackwell game), I'd say there's a good chance of getting one for Primordia too

 

[Yaar Podshipnik]

We do better if you buy through WEG and I believe that you'll get GOG and Steam keys, but not 100% sure on GOG key -- dunno if that's how GOG works.

I really wish that you do well, but WEG store looks like a hassle - it's another site that wants a shitload of my personal info and CC number. WTH do you need my name and address for a digital download sale?

I'll definitely get this from GOG, same as I did with Resonance.

 

[MRY]

@ Yaar -- I have no idea how e-commerce works, and I'm fairly sure that WEG just outsources it, but my assumption is that it's taking that information to prevent fraud in the purchase. I realize, of course, that having your information distributed across more databases increases the risk of its being compromised. I tend to share your mindset about not liking to give info to sites, so I certainly won't begrudge your waiting till GOG's sale starts.

 

[Jaesun]

Dave Gilbert ‏@WadjetEyeGames
One day on Greenlight and Primordia is already 40% of the way to the top 100. Thanks much, everyone! (and keep voting!)
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=108108057

If you guys have not done this yet, do it.

 

[Ninja Destroyer]

How this game needs greenlighting is beyond my understanding, but did my part and spread the news.

 

[Jaesun]

How this game needs greenlighting is beyond my understanding, but did my part and spread the news.

Valve doesn't like to put Wadjet Eye games on STEAM, so they only way that can try to get them on there is with Greenlight.

 

[Ninja Destroyer]

At least people are very positive about this, so they pass this in no time.

 

[kaizoku]

Valve sucks.

 

[JudasIscariot]

I'll just leave this here...

https://twitter.com/WadjetEyeGames/status/270579268625510400

 

[LizardKing]

Pre-ordered this one and just finished downloading the demo!