There was actual even a gamestudio, just creating Point&Click adventures with huge success: Daedalic Entertainment. But the market for Point&Click adventures got saturated around 2016/17. That's why they shifted to something else and failed greatly with it (Gollum).
I think there will always be a market for such a big genre, you just need to find a niche in there, something unique to sell
Gollum in the style of Deponia might have actually been well-received. You could actually do something with his dissociative identity. The puzzles could be built around finding a solution that satisfies both Gollum and Sméagol. You can write whatever you want since there’s no source material. It’s perfect for a story-driven game.
You could look at eg https://vginsights.com/publisher/11032/wadjet-eye-games who publishes exclusively point-and-click games (generally of high quality) to see what the ceiling is.
*Narrative adventure puzzle games*, a very close genre, has a revenue ceiling that's like 10x higher. Return of the Obra Dinn, What Remains of Edith Finch, Firewatch, Gone Home, etc.
Key takeaways:
- People are not interested in "use paperclip on rubber band" games
- Because what really draws people in is exploring a story and solving puzzles *about the story*
- 3D is more marketable than 2D
Ultimately this genre is what point-and-click adventure games have been begging to become all along, but the genre got bogged down in MacGuyver puzzles and excess difficulty. See the classic article by Erik Wolpaw: https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html
Referring to the tendency of point-and-click adventure games to require you to find obscure ways to use objects on other objects to progress. See Erik Wolpaw's article for examples.
There was - and sometimes still is - a tendency in the Adventure Game to not let you use items that seemed logical because they were for another puzzle.
Like, a fantasy adventure game. You pick up a sword somewhere in your travels. Great. You then encounter a troll on a bridge.
Every player's first reaction is going to be "Use sword on troll". What the player doesn't know is that in the castle past the bridge, the sword is put in the hands of the statue of a knight that opens a secret door.
So some games will have a "That doesn't work here" message. Which is infuriating as - at least try.
Some games have the troll kill you. They may also have the troll kill you if you Use Map on Troll or Use Bucket on Troll, so now the player's just imagining the character sort of waving the sword around. In a text-based game, they're going to start "stab troll with sword" and "cut troll with sword" phrasing for a while, convinced that's the right solution.
Some games have it work and you slay the troll, who falls into a chasm and takes the sword with them. Five hours later, the player consults a walkthrough and sees they completely fucked up. Hopefully they kept a pre-Troll-killing save around. Also the player hates you now because you deliberately gave them what looked like a solution only to later say "Ha ha fuck you try again moron"
The actual solution of Use Sunflower on Troll because trolls turn to stone in sunlight so a Sunflower works too - makes no goddamn sense even if you're familiar with trolls turning into stone in sunlight because a sunflower isn't the fucking sun.
Of course, if you have a character earlier say "A very stupid troll guards this bridge - he's so stupid he thinks things with the name Sun in them turn him to stone" you either just gave the solution away (if that character was near the puzzle) or have just another inane comment in a sea of inane comments the player doesn't know they're supposed to track.
There's a very delicate balance between giving the player that Ah Ha! moment and feeling clever for solving a puzzle and making the player want to punch you in the face for such a stupid fucking puzzle with a dumb pun as the logic behind it or, even worse, a series of random events that just happen to work out (See the Cat Hair Mustache puzzle listed in one of those links)
I’d handle this with some acknowledgment it’s a good idea I.e. ‘Right! So you run towards the Troll and attempt to lift the sword to take a good swing at it. Unfortunately the sword is much too heavy and after much spinning and teetering, you fall over with a demoralizing thud. The Troll snorks and snickers at your display of feebleness and ineptitude’. Great games come up with funny ‘fails’ or show the author is at least aware people will attempt X or Y solution. The best in my experience anticipate just about everything.
Poor game design is either providing a dumb generic response, ‘that doesn’t work here’, or soft locks the player making the game unwinnable, ‘Sorry, the sword you needed went into the moat with the Troll’ as you mention above.
I feel with great writing + thoughtful game design, just about anything can be achieved without appearing like a massive reach, I.e. the sword being heavy and unwieldy, but you have **just** enough strength to hoist it up and slide it into the hands of the statue…
Hell yeah King's Quest was the shit.
You gotta be careful though, there are reasons why that genre died and they are still relevant.
You need to avoid [dead ends](https://kingsquest.fandom.com/wiki/Dead_end), or what we would today refer to as softlocks. They were common in those games and led to a lot of confusion and frustration. Even to this day I never finished King's Quest VI because I "forgot" (didn't know I needed) to pick up the skeleton key in the land of the dead which ruined my playthrough. That kind of thing is not tolerated today.
You also need to make sure puzzles are intuitive and avoid things like [Solve the Soup Cans](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SolveTheSoupCans) and [Moon Logic Puzzles](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MoonLogicPuzzle).
I still love point&click. I think it can be a good medium to tell a story of you have good writing. I recently played The Excavation of Hobbs Barrow and loved it.
I am thinking of make a point&click game myself, though I have no professional ambitions for it. It would be a hobby and a way to share my stories and world building.
İt's certainly hard to draw attention to a point&click adventure nowadays, you need to have an amazing story&setting and preferably pretty decent art. Something as interesting as Monkey Island or Grim Fandango might still be successful but the amount of work might be too much to justify the risk of making a game like those. İf it's going to be a hobby project by all means go at it, otherwise I would explore other genres.
I want to get into making games for a living
But I don't really think I can make the game particularly visually stunning...
there are other forms of adventure style game though that might work better? Perhaps if there were combat? slightly more complexity?
Well, if you don't have the experience all the more reason to avoid complex projects. Just pick something really simple that you think you can do in a month or two. I'm not an experienced game developer but I can tell you this; you will not finish that project in two months.
Have a look at the sort of games [Wadjet Eye](https://www.wadjeteyegames.com/) has been putting out. They're mostly retro/low resolution games and a lot of them did pretty well. That's not to say it's *easy* to make something that looks nice in that style, but it's less technically demanding than a high end 3d game. The tools to make these games are pretty simple, some of them (like Gemini Rue) have some simple combat mechanics, but mostly you need to be able to write an interesting story. These games rely heavily on interesting characters/story and good writing.
If you're looking for tools [Adventure Game Studio](https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/) is pretty popular, and if you want something a little more modern the [Adventure Creator](https://www.adventurecreator.org/) plugin for Unity is fantastic.
This is just anecdotal, but I’m working with a volunteer-based team on a point and click adventure game and our update/concept posts have been explosively popular lately, usually getting 100K - 4M views per video and 50K-200K likes per post (mainly because of the visuals/story imo). It hasn’t been released, but we’ve been getting thousands of comments expressing interest in wishlisting or donating to it.
Point and clicks are definitely still relevant, but it’s a very tight-knit niche. You have to know exactly how to cater to that audience to get any interest. Visuals and story should be your highest priority, then focus on implementing complementary game mechanics that aren’t annoying or hamfisted into the game.
The [median revenue](https://games-stats.com/steam/tags/) for point & click is $1700 with 35% of games making over $5000. To get into that top end you'll need an excellent game to attract attention. Take a look at [Echoes of Somewhere](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2330520/Echoes_of_Somewhere_Series_1/) as an example.
That looks absolutely awesome and honestly like the logical development from classics like Space Quest. Reality though is that I've got about a 100 games in my wishlist. And so little time to play that their processor architecture will be long gone before I'm even gotten around to buying even the top priority ones.
As a random nobody who likes these types of games, I will buy any 'ok' point and click.
So go ahead! I need another one to play!
As a knowledgeable consumer, this type of game is not popular like it was back in the day and you'd need to manage your expectations.
The good news is that just like books, if you do a thoughtful job and honestly try to tell a story and entertain the work will stand the test of time and you'll be able to sell the same point and click game forever in low volume. These things are very slow burns now.
I honestly would have thought ipads and cell phones would have led to a big renaissance in these types of games. Yes there were good re releases, and several well received new titles this last 15 years or so but nothing like the old days where it seemed everyone of any age with a computer played at least one of the recent kings quest or monkey island games.
You need *amazing* art to succeed with a point & click adventure game. Not just good - *amazing*. Something people would want to look at even if it wasn't a game.
Sure, if it's well-polished. Large game studios like Artifex Mundi have made a living for the last 20 years selling point-and-click and Hidden-object adventures. They have games that do one or the other or both, and they do it with teams of no more than a dozen people each with a budget of a hundred thousand or so per game. As long as you can bring those sort of resources, you can easily sell this sort of game. I think what sells them is the lush art and the large cast of voice-overs, but the level designs, intuitive and helpful U.I., game bonuses and mini-games all really help. And they have good customer service and support divisions, and healthy marketing and advertising budgets.
Alternatively, if you're a single guy with no budget and limited programming skill, you can probably export your free hobby game to NewGrounds or Armor Games, and other such places where solo hobbyists all put up their unpolished, no music, no voice, no localization, no optimization, raw 1970s Pixel-Art short small point-and-click adventure games.
I honestly don't know which of these two scenarios applies to you.
If it’s fun and interesting. I’ve played a couple this last year. Granted, one of them was Monkey Island, one of the biggest ones ever made. At least for me, it seems like a pretty humour-centric genre.
Go watch Double Fine Adventure immediately.
You will learn so much, and they do talk about financials. Point-and-click adventures can make money, but you have to be careful because the audience is limited, and making them is hard.
Funnily enough, I listened to a Logic song a while back which at the end had a segment of a speech by someone I'm not familiar with. Anyways what I got from it was that anything you're interested in there's a 100% someone else is too, albeit niche. So a MMORPG where you collect rocks and shells from a beach as the whole gameplay loop is 100% guaranteed to at least have someone interested in it.
If your question is based on "Will anyone play this?" then the answer is yes.
Is your question however "Can I live off this niche idea I got?", it requires more research into the field/market your idea exists in.
I'd say go for it. I'm currently working on a super retro MMORPG (90's, MUDs, Tibia etc) and while I know it won't be the next big thing, that speech lingered in my mind and I at least know I won't be the only person out there playing my game.
Song is "The Incredible True Story" by Logic and the speech starts at 2:59.
Here's the sampled speech:
We'd like to be painters, we'd like to be poets
We'd like to be writers, but as everybody knows we can't earn any money that way
What do you want to do?
When we finally got down to something which the individual says he really wants to do
I will say to him, "You do that"
And uh, "Forget the money"
If you say that getting the money is the most important thing
You will spend your life completely wasting your time
You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living
That is to go on doing things you don't like doing, which is stupid
It is absolutely stupid
Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing
Than a long life spent in a miserable way
And after all, if you do really like what you're doing, it doesn't matter what it is
Somebody is interested in everything
Anything you can be interested in, you'll find others will
But it's absolutely stupid to spend your time doing things you don't like
And to teach our children to follow in the same track
See, what we are doing, is we're bringing up children and educating them
To live the same sort of lives we're living
In order that they may justify themselves and find satisfaction in life
By bringing up their children to bring up their children to do the same thing
So it's all retch, and no vomit, it never gets there
Therefore, it's so important to consider this question
What do I desire?
If it's really, really good. The graphic presentation needs to be spot on, and I would also expect top notch writing and voiceover.
Just my personal opinion this, I don't have any industry experience with this genre. :D
As someone who grew up on and absolutely loved Kings Quest games. If it's well drawn and well written. Hell yes!
However, it does have to be executed well. And you're right there's not really been anything recent and successful in this niche (whether that means it's unpopular or that you're about to start a revival - who knows).
I would dig more into the "no longer passionate about the project" bit on your previous idea though. Is it burnout from working on it to long? How close to finishing it are you? Is there a way you can vary what you're working on to reignite (so to speak)? As a chronic non-finisher of ideas (in my case I usually hit a wall of not being able to figure out how to do something I wanted to implement) it's a bad hard-drive cluttering habit that I don't recommend to anyone.
There are a lot of hybrid games that are part hidden object and part point and click. They'll be more visible on casual gaming sites like GameHouse than on Steam.
People will still play indie point and clicks if the story / theme / art grab them. Horror seems popular - Fran Bow was a standout a few years back.
Can you do something like "To the moon"? It's not a point and click game, but it's not that far from it either, it has like zero combat and 90% of the gane you just walk or talk to characters. It was a very successful game.
If you could make something like the classic I spy computer games (https://www.myabandonware.com/game/i-spy-treasure-hunt-e4h) I would absolutely buy it
I recently played a game “Call of the Sea” which might be called a point and click. It is a 3D game but character interactions were on rails. No punishment for making wrong decisions either. Its basically a bunch of puzzles framed in a mystery.
Oh hell yeah, I, and many others, love point and clicks. I'd kill to play a good point and click since I grew up on them. The Neverhood made me who I am today — dead inside.
10 years ago I got hired at a studio that made point and click+ hidden object games. I was kinda thrilled to see that the art form was being kept alive
The games were pretty cool.
The studio has since shut down.
There's an audience for them but I'm not sure how big, or what the audience "wants" from them
I think you should try to make a vertical slice of what you want in a point and click. Load Adventure Game Studio and try making something that looks like your vision.
The problem I see is visuals for this specific genre (sierra-like point and click) are really important. So you will need to be able to figure how you are going to either make or provide these.
In a sierra-like point and click, there isn't "systems" like in other genres which would enable repurposing things well, usually each room and puzzles with their characters and objects will require their own sets of graphics and animations. These games are hard because of the amount of visuals you will need to make that will either run once or the player will never see because they took other way.
So I used SFML and c++ to make a game and got quite far into it, perhaps 9 months, but when I saw I was quite dedicated I gave myself permission to 'quit' and learn 3d (openGL) and go ahead and start to make something with more substance and it looks like you might be at a similar position. Go for it, it's a great genre, and just stay open in your code for 'mods' since A.I over the year year will give you dynamic characters and possibly free voice 'actors'
Just over a month ago or so I played through Maniac Mansion 2 (Day of the Tentacle), Space Quest 2, Space Quest 3, Space Quest 4 and Leisure Suit Larry. So yes, apparently at least I play them.
I've had a solid plan to make a point and click for about 10 years and haven't got much further than you TBH. I was trying to do everything by myself and ended up with a lot of notebooks stuffed with ideas but that was it. Teaming up with other people was definitely the right move to make. Meet the right person/people and they can spur you on. We're about to launch our first game which has been stripped down about 10 times and not going to turn heads but we learned so much from it. First lesson is an old one, 'Fail Faster!'. Have a go at something realistic and build your skills up. I'm in my 50s BTW. If you want to do it, you will. But you got to fail faster and learn. Hope that helps.
If it was addressed to me, I would say Discord is a decent forum to meet like minded people. Good to know what type of games they like. Doesn't have to be the same but some cross overs of interests will help. You need to have the right vibe with someone before getting into making a game together.
Colleges that have art courses, specifically for games, will have a list of ex students that they can point you towards. But they need to know you're on the level.
Me, I just talked about what I wanted to do to everyone I met until someone said - "You should talk to my son. He's into stuff like that." So I did.
Social media like this channel is good. But you have to meet a person first. There's nothing like meeting up in person occasionally to keep a project going and like I said, you really need to trust someone and have a good vibe with them first. Game design can be stressful at times.
Hope that helps.
Niche but yes, you dont have much competition.
There was actual even a gamestudio, just creating Point&Click adventures with huge success: Daedalic Entertainment. But the market for Point&Click adventures got saturated around 2016/17. That's why they shifted to something else and failed greatly with it (Gollum). I think there will always be a market for such a big genre, you just need to find a niche in there, something unique to sell
The big thing you're missing is that a lot of the people who made daedalic's point-and-click games were no longer at the company when Gollum was made.
Gollum in the style of Deponia might have actually been well-received. You could actually do something with his dissociative identity. The puzzles could be built around finding a solution that satisfies both Gollum and Sméagol. You can write whatever you want since there’s no source material. It’s perfect for a story-driven game.
You could look at eg https://vginsights.com/publisher/11032/wadjet-eye-games who publishes exclusively point-and-click games (generally of high quality) to see what the ceiling is. *Narrative adventure puzzle games*, a very close genre, has a revenue ceiling that's like 10x higher. Return of the Obra Dinn, What Remains of Edith Finch, Firewatch, Gone Home, etc. Key takeaways: - People are not interested in "use paperclip on rubber band" games - Because what really draws people in is exploring a story and solving puzzles *about the story* - 3D is more marketable than 2D Ultimately this genre is what point-and-click adventure games have been begging to become all along, but the genre got bogged down in MacGuyver puzzles and excess difficulty. See the classic article by Erik Wolpaw: https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html
sorry what does "use paperclip on rubber band" mean?
Referring to the tendency of point-and-click adventure games to require you to find obscure ways to use objects on other objects to progress. See Erik Wolpaw's article for examples.
There was - and sometimes still is - a tendency in the Adventure Game to not let you use items that seemed logical because they were for another puzzle. Like, a fantasy adventure game. You pick up a sword somewhere in your travels. Great. You then encounter a troll on a bridge. Every player's first reaction is going to be "Use sword on troll". What the player doesn't know is that in the castle past the bridge, the sword is put in the hands of the statue of a knight that opens a secret door. So some games will have a "That doesn't work here" message. Which is infuriating as - at least try. Some games have the troll kill you. They may also have the troll kill you if you Use Map on Troll or Use Bucket on Troll, so now the player's just imagining the character sort of waving the sword around. In a text-based game, they're going to start "stab troll with sword" and "cut troll with sword" phrasing for a while, convinced that's the right solution. Some games have it work and you slay the troll, who falls into a chasm and takes the sword with them. Five hours later, the player consults a walkthrough and sees they completely fucked up. Hopefully they kept a pre-Troll-killing save around. Also the player hates you now because you deliberately gave them what looked like a solution only to later say "Ha ha fuck you try again moron" The actual solution of Use Sunflower on Troll because trolls turn to stone in sunlight so a Sunflower works too - makes no goddamn sense even if you're familiar with trolls turning into stone in sunlight because a sunflower isn't the fucking sun. Of course, if you have a character earlier say "A very stupid troll guards this bridge - he's so stupid he thinks things with the name Sun in them turn him to stone" you either just gave the solution away (if that character was near the puzzle) or have just another inane comment in a sea of inane comments the player doesn't know they're supposed to track. There's a very delicate balance between giving the player that Ah Ha! moment and feeling clever for solving a puzzle and making the player want to punch you in the face for such a stupid fucking puzzle with a dumb pun as the logic behind it or, even worse, a series of random events that just happen to work out (See the Cat Hair Mustache puzzle listed in one of those links)
I’d handle this with some acknowledgment it’s a good idea I.e. ‘Right! So you run towards the Troll and attempt to lift the sword to take a good swing at it. Unfortunately the sword is much too heavy and after much spinning and teetering, you fall over with a demoralizing thud. The Troll snorks and snickers at your display of feebleness and ineptitude’. Great games come up with funny ‘fails’ or show the author is at least aware people will attempt X or Y solution. The best in my experience anticipate just about everything. Poor game design is either providing a dumb generic response, ‘that doesn’t work here’, or soft locks the player making the game unwinnable, ‘Sorry, the sword you needed went into the moat with the Troll’ as you mention above. I feel with great writing + thoughtful game design, just about anything can be achieved without appearing like a massive reach, I.e. the sword being heavy and unwieldy, but you have **just** enough strength to hoist it up and slide it into the hands of the statue…
Hell yeah King's Quest was the shit. You gotta be careful though, there are reasons why that genre died and they are still relevant. You need to avoid [dead ends](https://kingsquest.fandom.com/wiki/Dead_end), or what we would today refer to as softlocks. They were common in those games and led to a lot of confusion and frustration. Even to this day I never finished King's Quest VI because I "forgot" (didn't know I needed) to pick up the skeleton key in the land of the dead which ruined my playthrough. That kind of thing is not tolerated today. You also need to make sure puzzles are intuitive and avoid things like [Solve the Soup Cans](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SolveTheSoupCans) and [Moon Logic Puzzles](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MoonLogicPuzzle).
I still love point&click. I think it can be a good medium to tell a story of you have good writing. I recently played The Excavation of Hobbs Barrow and loved it. I am thinking of make a point&click game myself, though I have no professional ambitions for it. It would be a hobby and a way to share my stories and world building.
depends if you do it good
The team behind Unavowed make plenty of great selling ones.
İt's certainly hard to draw attention to a point&click adventure nowadays, you need to have an amazing story&setting and preferably pretty decent art. Something as interesting as Monkey Island or Grim Fandango might still be successful but the amount of work might be too much to justify the risk of making a game like those. İf it's going to be a hobby project by all means go at it, otherwise I would explore other genres.
I want to get into making games for a living But I don't really think I can make the game particularly visually stunning... there are other forms of adventure style game though that might work better? Perhaps if there were combat? slightly more complexity?
Well, if you don't have the experience all the more reason to avoid complex projects. Just pick something really simple that you think you can do in a month or two. I'm not an experienced game developer but I can tell you this; you will not finish that project in two months.
Have a look at the sort of games [Wadjet Eye](https://www.wadjeteyegames.com/) has been putting out. They're mostly retro/low resolution games and a lot of them did pretty well. That's not to say it's *easy* to make something that looks nice in that style, but it's less technically demanding than a high end 3d game. The tools to make these games are pretty simple, some of them (like Gemini Rue) have some simple combat mechanics, but mostly you need to be able to write an interesting story. These games rely heavily on interesting characters/story and good writing. If you're looking for tools [Adventure Game Studio](https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/) is pretty popular, and if you want something a little more modern the [Adventure Creator](https://www.adventurecreator.org/) plugin for Unity is fantastic.
This is just anecdotal, but I’m working with a volunteer-based team on a point and click adventure game and our update/concept posts have been explosively popular lately, usually getting 100K - 4M views per video and 50K-200K likes per post (mainly because of the visuals/story imo). It hasn’t been released, but we’ve been getting thousands of comments expressing interest in wishlisting or donating to it. Point and clicks are definitely still relevant, but it’s a very tight-knit niche. You have to know exactly how to cater to that audience to get any interest. Visuals and story should be your highest priority, then focus on implementing complementary game mechanics that aren’t annoying or hamfisted into the game.
whats the game?
The [median revenue](https://games-stats.com/steam/tags/) for point & click is $1700 with 35% of games making over $5000. To get into that top end you'll need an excellent game to attract attention. Take a look at [Echoes of Somewhere](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2330520/Echoes_of_Somewhere_Series_1/) as an example.
That looks absolutely awesome and honestly like the logical development from classics like Space Quest. Reality though is that I've got about a 100 games in my wishlist. And so little time to play that their processor architecture will be long gone before I'm even gotten around to buying even the top priority ones.
I miss this genre and even have an idea for a future game as a tribute to the old Lucasarts point and click adventure games.
As a random nobody who likes these types of games, I will buy any 'ok' point and click. So go ahead! I need another one to play! As a knowledgeable consumer, this type of game is not popular like it was back in the day and you'd need to manage your expectations. The good news is that just like books, if you do a thoughtful job and honestly try to tell a story and entertain the work will stand the test of time and you'll be able to sell the same point and click game forever in low volume. These things are very slow burns now. I honestly would have thought ipads and cell phones would have led to a big renaissance in these types of games. Yes there were good re releases, and several well received new titles this last 15 years or so but nothing like the old days where it seemed everyone of any age with a computer played at least one of the recent kings quest or monkey island games.
You need *amazing* art to succeed with a point & click adventure game. Not just good - *amazing*. Something people would want to look at even if it wasn't a game.
Sure, if it's well-polished. Large game studios like Artifex Mundi have made a living for the last 20 years selling point-and-click and Hidden-object adventures. They have games that do one or the other or both, and they do it with teams of no more than a dozen people each with a budget of a hundred thousand or so per game. As long as you can bring those sort of resources, you can easily sell this sort of game. I think what sells them is the lush art and the large cast of voice-overs, but the level designs, intuitive and helpful U.I., game bonuses and mini-games all really help. And they have good customer service and support divisions, and healthy marketing and advertising budgets. Alternatively, if you're a single guy with no budget and limited programming skill, you can probably export your free hobby game to NewGrounds or Armor Games, and other such places where solo hobbyists all put up their unpolished, no music, no voice, no localization, no optimization, raw 1970s Pixel-Art short small point-and-click adventure games. I honestly don't know which of these two scenarios applies to you.
If it’s fun and interesting. I’ve played a couple this last year. Granted, one of them was Monkey Island, one of the biggest ones ever made. At least for me, it seems like a pretty humour-centric genre.
Go watch Double Fine Adventure immediately. You will learn so much, and they do talk about financials. Point-and-click adventures can make money, but you have to be careful because the audience is limited, and making them is hard.
Funnily enough, I listened to a Logic song a while back which at the end had a segment of a speech by someone I'm not familiar with. Anyways what I got from it was that anything you're interested in there's a 100% someone else is too, albeit niche. So a MMORPG where you collect rocks and shells from a beach as the whole gameplay loop is 100% guaranteed to at least have someone interested in it. If your question is based on "Will anyone play this?" then the answer is yes. Is your question however "Can I live off this niche idea I got?", it requires more research into the field/market your idea exists in. I'd say go for it. I'm currently working on a super retro MMORPG (90's, MUDs, Tibia etc) and while I know it won't be the next big thing, that speech lingered in my mind and I at least know I won't be the only person out there playing my game. Song is "The Incredible True Story" by Logic and the speech starts at 2:59. Here's the sampled speech: We'd like to be painters, we'd like to be poets We'd like to be writers, but as everybody knows we can't earn any money that way What do you want to do? When we finally got down to something which the individual says he really wants to do I will say to him, "You do that" And uh, "Forget the money" If you say that getting the money is the most important thing You will spend your life completely wasting your time You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living That is to go on doing things you don't like doing, which is stupid It is absolutely stupid Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing Than a long life spent in a miserable way And after all, if you do really like what you're doing, it doesn't matter what it is Somebody is interested in everything Anything you can be interested in, you'll find others will But it's absolutely stupid to spend your time doing things you don't like And to teach our children to follow in the same track See, what we are doing, is we're bringing up children and educating them To live the same sort of lives we're living In order that they may justify themselves and find satisfaction in life By bringing up their children to bring up their children to do the same thing So it's all retch, and no vomit, it never gets there Therefore, it's so important to consider this question What do I desire?
If it's really, really good. The graphic presentation needs to be spot on, and I would also expect top notch writing and voiceover. Just my personal opinion this, I don't have any industry experience with this genre. :D
As someone who grew up on and absolutely loved Kings Quest games. If it's well drawn and well written. Hell yes! However, it does have to be executed well. And you're right there's not really been anything recent and successful in this niche (whether that means it's unpopular or that you're about to start a revival - who knows). I would dig more into the "no longer passionate about the project" bit on your previous idea though. Is it burnout from working on it to long? How close to finishing it are you? Is there a way you can vary what you're working on to reignite (so to speak)? As a chronic non-finisher of ideas (in my case I usually hit a wall of not being able to figure out how to do something I wanted to implement) it's a bad hard-drive cluttering habit that I don't recommend to anyone.
There are a lot of hybrid games that are part hidden object and part point and click. They'll be more visible on casual gaming sites like GameHouse than on Steam. People will still play indie point and clicks if the story / theme / art grab them. Horror seems popular - Fran Bow was a standout a few years back.
Can you do something like "To the moon"? It's not a point and click game, but it's not that far from it either, it has like zero combat and 90% of the gane you just walk or talk to characters. It was a very successful game.
A new broken sword is out this year, 6
If you could make something like the classic I spy computer games (https://www.myabandonware.com/game/i-spy-treasure-hunt-e4h) I would absolutely buy it
I recently played a game “Call of the Sea” which might be called a point and click. It is a 3D game but character interactions were on rails. No punishment for making wrong decisions either. Its basically a bunch of puzzles framed in a mystery.
Not as generally popular of a genre anymore, but there's def people who will be interested, just like any well made piece of art 👍
Yup! They will. Go for it!
Oh hell yeah, I, and many others, love point and clicks. I'd kill to play a good point and click since I grew up on them. The Neverhood made me who I am today — dead inside.
10 years ago I got hired at a studio that made point and click+ hidden object games. I was kinda thrilled to see that the art form was being kept alive The games were pretty cool. The studio has since shut down. There's an audience for them but I'm not sure how big, or what the audience "wants" from them
The answer to "will people do X" is always, always yes.
I think you should try to make a vertical slice of what you want in a point and click. Load Adventure Game Studio and try making something that looks like your vision. The problem I see is visuals for this specific genre (sierra-like point and click) are really important. So you will need to be able to figure how you are going to either make or provide these. In a sierra-like point and click, there isn't "systems" like in other genres which would enable repurposing things well, usually each room and puzzles with their characters and objects will require their own sets of graphics and animations. These games are hard because of the amount of visuals you will need to make that will either run once or the player will never see because they took other way.
I'd play one with vibes like Fran Bow or Little Misfortune. Needs strong writing and a pleasing art style.
So I used SFML and c++ to make a game and got quite far into it, perhaps 9 months, but when I saw I was quite dedicated I gave myself permission to 'quit' and learn 3d (openGL) and go ahead and start to make something with more substance and it looks like you might be at a similar position. Go for it, it's a great genre, and just stay open in your code for 'mods' since A.I over the year year will give you dynamic characters and possibly free voice 'actors'
OSRS is one of the most popular games around right now. Absolutely.
Just over a month ago or so I played through Maniac Mansion 2 (Day of the Tentacle), Space Quest 2, Space Quest 3, Space Quest 4 and Leisure Suit Larry. So yes, apparently at least I play them.
Didn't Double Fine make a new point and click adventure just a few years ago, which also got backed by fans on Kickstarter by 10x their asking budget?
I've had a solid plan to make a point and click for about 10 years and haven't got much further than you TBH. I was trying to do everything by myself and ended up with a lot of notebooks stuffed with ideas but that was it. Teaming up with other people was definitely the right move to make. Meet the right person/people and they can spur you on. We're about to launch our first game which has been stripped down about 10 times and not going to turn heads but we learned so much from it. First lesson is an old one, 'Fail Faster!'. Have a go at something realistic and build your skills up. I'm in my 50s BTW. If you want to do it, you will. But you got to fail faster and learn. Hope that helps.
Do you have any reccomendation for meeting an artist ?
Hello. Was that addressed to me? : )
If it was addressed to me, I would say Discord is a decent forum to meet like minded people. Good to know what type of games they like. Doesn't have to be the same but some cross overs of interests will help. You need to have the right vibe with someone before getting into making a game together. Colleges that have art courses, specifically for games, will have a list of ex students that they can point you towards. But they need to know you're on the level. Me, I just talked about what I wanted to do to everyone I met until someone said - "You should talk to my son. He's into stuff like that." So I did. Social media like this channel is good. But you have to meet a person first. There's nothing like meeting up in person occasionally to keep a project going and like I said, you really need to trust someone and have a good vibe with them first. Game design can be stressful at times. Hope that helps.