Point and Click: An Intro to My Journey Designing an Adventure Game

I get bored at work. Everyone does, I’m sure. You find a lull in your day and your mind begins to wander from subject to subject. But I have a bit of a problem.
My brain only goes to one place, again and again.
But let’s take a step back first. I’ve been playing video games as long as I can remember. One of my earliest memories is trying to play Elmo’s Number Journey for PlayStation 1. I think part of it is younger brother syndrome, as I like to call it. My brother, 7.5 years my senior, was able to be a lot more involved in his gaming compared to me. When I was 5 and just starting to get a grasp on my number and letters, my brother was 12 and playing things like Legend of Mana. I wanted to be involved in this cool kids club that my brother would constantly deny me. Back to the point though, as I got older I slowly amassed my own collection of games to play, and one I happened upon was Pajama Sam 3: You Are What You Eat From Your Head To Your Feet, again for the PlayStation 1.
Something about this game… it stuck with me, to say the least. At first it was just a nice memory from a simpler time in my childhood, a clunky little point and click adventure game ported to a console it probably should not have been on. A few years passed and college rolled around though, and I found a little website called GOG. Long story short, GOG had a bundle of Pajama Sam 3 and 4, and I bought it for myself, a pleasant trip back down memory lane.
While some parts of the game were just pure nostalgia, George ‘The Fat Man’ Sanger’s soundtrack is one that I can still listen to when I need some good instrumental work when I’m trying to write. The dialogue and premise are just cheesy enough that I roll my eyes out of love instead of annoyance. However, it wasn’t until a certain thought crossed my mind at work one day that the brilliance of Pajama Sam 3 began to reveal itself to me.
One of my favorite challenges to myself come from when I really dislike a game. I’m sure time and time again, you’ve come across a game you thought would be fun and it just doesn’t like up to your expectations. For me, one of those games was Pajama Sam 4: Like is Rough When You Lose Your Stuff. I’m not here to weigh in on if Pajama Sam 4 is a good or bad game, but I will think it is a disappointing game compared to the first three. So I posed a challenge to myself: “Alright, tough guy. If you think this game is so bad, what would YOU have done?” and I think that was a fair question to ask myself. It’s not enough to just say you don’t like something, you need to bring something to the table, a solution.
So that’s what I started to do at work.
I began thinking about what I would do if I would make a point and click adventure game in the style of those that I had grown up loving. Something akin to a Yooka-Laylee to Banjo-Kazooie, something that was made out of love and tried to captures that which made the original thing so beloved. Now, it’s hard to capture lightning in a bottle, but I knew if I wanted to emulate something, I would have to look back at it and see what it was made up of. This is where my brain would keep coming back to over and over again. Because I believe Pajama Sam 3 is the perfect example of how to design the intro to an adventure game.
I went over the first part of the game ad nauseam at work. I would draw diagrams, I created maps, and started to see through the basic guise of a game for 3–8 year olds, and started to see something much more sophisticated. What that game taught me that was so important was something that I had heard before that I’ll go over later, but Arin Hanson in his video Sequelitis — Mega Man Classic vs. Mega Man X discusses in length the innate ability of games to teach players the mechanics and rules of a game just through game play. Pajama Sam 3 is the Mega Man X of the world of adventure games. It’s not the best adventure game ever made, but it does an amazing job of displaying what games can do.
So now that you have some background, you can better understand what this series is going to be: I’m going to go through everything that I learned from Pajama Sam 3 (and other games along the way) to help me design a hypothetical game.
Maybe along the way we’ll get to see more of what that game would have looked like?
Next time — Point and Click: Mouse States and Your First Screen.
