I think many IF games would adapt beautifully to touchscreen, even without flashy graphics. I’ve been beating this drum for a while. Look at what a smashing success the adaptation of A Dark Room was for touchscreen. There is money to be made, if someone with the oomph did it. People like good stories. They just don’t like typing.
Hadean Lands is a brilliant choice for this, and so is Counterfeit Monkey. I can just see the little letter-remover icon where you spin a little alphabet wheel to the letter you want. My first choice for an adaptation would be Art DiBianca’s The Wand, which could be beautifully adapted with the color combinations for the wand. Then HL or CM.
Somebody who knows how should really do this, provided the authors were amenable.
I’ve been buying Ming-dynasty vases in bulk the past couple of years. But you have hit the button! Let me throw graphically advanced machines with their associated viewscreens against already prettily printer-inked and monitor-graveled walls.
This question actually made me think of Hadean Lands too – at first, I thought a graphical interface could work really well with the alchemical rituals, as you could implement all the alchemical formulae as progressively-unlocked buttons on a specialized interface that would also include all your ingredients (and which could in turn perhaps allow for customized notes and sorting as you identified their different properties). But I wasn’t sure how you’d implement the game’s major “shortcut” features like going to rooms you haven’t yet visited, or creating a new product when it doesn’t yet exist in the world. Upon reflection you could add a “go here” button to the map, and a “create this product/perform this ritual” button in the alchemical index, but I’m not sure it’d be quite as flexible as what the text parser enables you to do.
Still, it’d be cool for someone to try, since I could see the game piquing a lot of interest if it was made more accessible to a non-IF audience - there’ve been all these games lately about potion-making and herbology, and I’ve dipped into them but largely bounced off since the alchemical systems seem superficial and game-y compared to Hadean Lands.
I think people would be open to a graphical alchemy puzzle game.
People primarily enjoy the Atelier games for the crafting systems, though those are also turn-based (mostly) JRPGs, which have their own pull. Console players might also appreciate a game that doesn’t have the… issues that the Atelier games have.
I always considered a challenge of mid-to-late HL to be information management. I think there are opportunities to make this easier in a delivery format that doesn’t form-feed line by line. Having a map with pins or item lists or even puzzles required for entering an area (solved vs unsolved) would all be ways to manage information in new and possibly beneficial ways.
I don’t think it could be as flexible, but I don’t think most players care about that as long as they don’t have to type.
I’m not even sure you’d need very many graphics to make it work-- just the rituals, perhaps. I think clicking/tapping on a verb list and words in the text would probably work well, and then maybe GO TO/CREATE buttons that you could scroll on to pick a location or perform a ritual.
There are a number of games in the App store that are tappable text games, and some of them work very well indeed. If anyone’s interested in a list of games like this for inspiration, they should DM me, because when I’m not playing IF on my computer, I’m playing IF on my iPad and looking for text games that are hybrids of parser and choice. I have an extensive list.
I should say that I think Hadean Lands is not a great candidate for a graphical adaptation. The puzzles are not visual at all, aside from a couple of combination locks. The game information is multisensory – I spend a lot of time describing different smells, textures, feelings, and even emotional responses as you go through the rituals. In graphical form that would be, what? Different colored bubbles and steam and some sound effects? I think it would really flatten it out in a boring way.
there’ve been all these games lately about potion-making and herbology
Remember, both Emily and I like to lean into ideas that cater specifically to the prose format. Stuff that would be absurdly expensive or difficult to render graphically.
The whole point of Counterfeit Monkey is these offhanded lists of evocatively described items. I mean, look at one line of the source:
The description of the art is “It’s a very plausible copy of [one of]‘Still Life with a Bunch of Rapes’ by the great feminist Atlantean painter Annamarie Rosehip[or]‘A Portrait of Whistler’s Other’ by Thomas Whistler Rosehip[or]‘Still Life with Bead Loaf’ by the surrealist painter Lewis Rosehip[or]‘Flight of the Turtledoes’ by the surrealist great Lewis Rosehip[or]the narrative painting ‘If Wishes Were Horses, Bears Would Ride’ by the great Atlantean socialist painter Lawrence Rosehip[or]Théophile Rosehip’s surprisingly erotic classical work ‘The Aft of the Medusa’[sticky random].”
Are you going to hand that to a 3D artist and say “Here, whip these off for me?” And repeat for the other three thousand object descriptions?
For my part, I had a lot of fun with lines like
You wave the sprig, and inhale its distinct resinous aroma. But the ritual feels ungrounded and adrift.
You rumble your way through the Dracon Invocation. But the words lack directionality.
The aroma of zafranum melds with the smell of the ocean, provoking images of sea-travel and distant lands.
The non-visual descriptions are very much on purpose.
However much I like some cross-medium adaptations, this talk about “Wouldn’t it be great to transfer IF-game X into Graphic-game Y” as if it were an upgrade or a bid for an expanded audience feels like someone were to try and adapt Tolkien to the big screen…
There’s another approach maybe. The player’s choices could affect the styling of the graphical display. Reflecting the mood of a player who wants the ‘nasty’ path for the character by darkening the tones of the frames and controls.
Or a generic diorama in SVG which can be lit for night and day, or where some characters grey out when they die. All these things support the text as the main vector of ideas, hopefully not to contradict the visual imagination of the player.
Very fair point! I was honestly picturing a pretty stripped-down presentation where text remains the primary form of feedback. Like, I just finished playing the Last Door, where the pixel graphics are sufficiently chunky that you need to rely on the text to convey what you’re seeing, much less what your other senses can tell you.
I enjoyed it too - it’s why I said “largely” rather than “completely” - albeit ultimately felt like its mechanics had less room to be elaborated than I wanted. Fortunately it had the good sense to end at about that point, rather than extend things to the point of tedium!
A Mind Forever Voyaging might transfer well. It’s a highly experiential and visual-heavy game light on puzzles and riddles. Perry’s actual experience in the simulator could be beautifully rendered via first person, and showing the same maps over time jumps to show the effects of “The Plan” and the ravages of time seems like the sort of thing that 3D engines excel at. (Brings to mind the experience of playing the same test chambers between Portal 1 & 2, for example) That said, the juxtaposition of switching to the real world, that only shows flat security camera imagery and text menus as Perry’s limited perception of the real word, could be an interesting and jarring experience for the player. Good luck getting Microsoft to green light it, though, as I’m pretty sure they own the rights now.
Seeing this, I am struck every time I watch a movie where they say “Your mission is:” how perfectly Spider & Web could work as a movie. Like, just think about some of the stuff like the package collection at the beginning in an iconic location, contrasted with collecting your gun later on. Okay, it could be a 30 minute film or a feature film. Either way, I’d watch it loads of times if it ever comes out (provided they don’t do a rubbish job of it).
Since this thread was necroed anyway: a 3D graphic adventure based on Vespers was in development for a long time; in the end I think it proved too much work for a small (one-person?) team, but it came surprisingly far along.