"Another World" source code review (2011)
fabiensanglard.net
fabiensanglard.net
The story is told without a line of text, and yet you can easily piece together what's going on; there is a single weapon, but combat is innovative and cinematic; some puzzles are ingenious and based exclusively on player's observation skills and execution.
The fact that it was developed by a single person (at the time, no Unity or Unreal Engine or ubiquitous Internet, knowledge about game programming was HARD to come by), makes it a unique feat.
For those interested, another incredibly interesting and related reading is Jordan Mechner's recount of the making of Prince of Persia :
http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/PluginXWorld
Demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=np_97afob4g
For prototyping games I feel the old tech still works fine and I certainly enjoy writing it more so far. Maybe if there was a more 'abstract' way/tool to tweak 'off the shelf' meshes into what you need... I mean; a tool like, I think, Fallout where you can just change facial and body features but then doing that with trucks, houses, weapons etc and trying out textures on them would be enough for me to make cool games which look modern. I have a kind of adversity against 3d tools because I really get frustrated when using them; even after following a lot of blender/3ds/unity tutorials I couldn't even make trivial things. Do tools like that exist?
"Modern" graphics are the equivalent of CGI-filled Hollywood blockbusters: incredibly expensive in both time and money and, most of the time, superfluous. As a single person or small team, you'll probably want to do something more personal and stylish.
Even DOOM or Papers Please-level graphics are achievable by a single person in the timeframe of about a year or less, if you have a good idea of what you want.
Your idea for an easy tool to manipulate off-the-shelf meshes is a good one. Lots of successful games have used stock models lately, Goat Simulator comes to mind.
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014630/Classic-Game-Postmortem...
Wonderful title.
That first time through is killer. I have no shame in admitting that one of the first things I looked up when I got internet access as a kid were hints on it...
I don't think it was that hard compared to other games of the time. I could finish it in a week, and you could die as many times as you wanted which made it much easier to complete.
Compare that with adventure games from the time which were virtually impossible to complete without walkthroughs.
To the point where a game with a bit of a learning curve, like hyper light drifter, is considered exceptional because of it.
There are also modern games that are also really hard. For example "Super Meat Boy" is said to be really hard (in terms of platforming skills): http://supermeatboy.com/
Or if you prefer something that is really hard, but on your brain, I recommend the puzzle game "Stephen's Sausage Roll" that came out about one month ago: http://www.stephenssausageroll.com/
Here's the official manual for SCUMM: http://wilmunder.com/Arics_World/Games_files/SCUMM%20Tutoria...
And the official tutorial: http://wilmunder.com/Arics_World/Games_files/SCUMM%20Tutoria...
There are several post-mortems about Maniac Mansion that go a bit into the creation of SCUMM: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNpjGvJwyL8 * http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014732/Classic-Game-Postmortem...
I never knew it used a VM. Sounds remarkably uncommon for games at the time.
And thanks to that we have ScummVM now.
Personally at least I'd expect "bytecode" to usually refer to a more complicated and usually "lossy" remapping of instructions (e.g. at the very least throwing away comments and trimming identifiers (Microsoft BASIC only looked at the first few letters of an identifier to identify a variable, but stored the rest as part of the source)).