It's a slow day in Mexico

Been a little shy with the updates recently, mostly due to the fact that not much has really been going on. Trying to finalize a lot of puzzle based aspects and it's very time consuming and confusing to me, especially trying to break the whole ADVENTURE GAME MOLD of click everything possible until something works.

Creating unique puzzles in adventure games is a pretty big challenge as a lot of adventure games recycle similar formulas for their puzzles. It consists of "Click everything until something works, "Combine Items Until something works," or "Talk to Someone until they give you the answer." Everyone wants to do something unique but it's not really going to happen. I think people are too afraid of using a formula that a game has already used in their independent games and that could often be their downfall. But in the same sense you don't want to just force the user to click everything until something works.

Let's look at the opening puzzle of a game I played recently (and got bored of after the first screen, switched off and never played again.) "The Longest Journey." We open up with our main character on a cliff face, you examine everything in site to get two items, Stick, and Shell Piece. (Possibly not the correct names but that is what they are.) Talk to a tree to be given an objective, for no apparent reason combine the two items you have to create "Funnel" of all things which pretty much gives away the answer of what you need to do next. Use it on the only other object around (Diverted Stream) to divert the water back to the tree to give it life.

It was an illogical pointless puzzle that almost gave you all the answers but still didn't make sense. Combined with boring dialogue I promptly uninstalled this game and deleted the .ISO from my computer, I wont be playing that again. Now how can I learn from it's mistakes.

Yeah Yeah, Shut up and give us some Game stuff...

In regards to the score aspect of the game that I mentioned in my last post, I have been working pretty hard on this front. I've totally revamped every piece of music I had composed up to this point and I think it's starting to sound slightly professional quality if I do say so myself. I'm really happy with it considering the amount of time I have put into it (lots) so I'll definitely throw up a WIP I have going right now that any of you may be interested to listen to:

Cold Stone.mp3

It's work in progress but I'm happy with how it is sounding.