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To be honest, I thought it sounded awful! But having played it I like what they're doing. The story and gameplay are not closely tied together, but they're both pleasing enough on their own.

Today, I'm going to share with you a secret of plot writing that I have never heard anybody else share. Why has nobody ever said it before? Possibly because it's obvious. It kind of is with hindsight. Or perhaps because the secret is so incredibly valuable that they don't want to give it away.

Fortunately for you I'm a very lazy person. I doubt I'll ever write an adventure game plot. Which means this secret is of little value to me, and I'm going to share it with you. Lucky, lucky people.

The Problem -- why writing adventure game stories is hard...

In a classic adventure story, you have a protagonist who leaves their day to day life, quickly masters a range of skills, passes through one trial after another, overcomes massive odds, wins the heart of a beautiful woman with sheer charisma, and eventually vanquishes the foe through force of will and inherent brilliance.

In an adventure game the protagonist is an idiot. He spends the whole time wondering around cluelessly asking the same questions over and over again, mindlessly trying to combine objects or pick up pieces of scenery. The protagonist is constantly failing. Worse, the player never overcomes any odds. In the best LucasArts adventures you cannot fail. There is no jeopardy at all.

If you were to write down what the hero does in an adventure game then it would not make for exciting reading:

John Magnet approached the barman and started a conversation. He suddenly realized he'd already asked every question he could think of, and walked away. He tried to steal another drinker's beer, but the drinker told him he couldn't have it. He tried again. The beer drinker threatened him a bit, but stopped short of any actual violence.

Then John Magnet went back to his house to see if anything there had changed. It hadn't. It was still the same. He looked to see if he'd missed any possibly useful objects lying around. He opened his underwear drawer again. Still empty. Magnet left his house, returned to the bar, and approached the barman.

Even Dan Brown writes better prose than this.

And yet the best adventure games have great stories. How can you do this?

One way to do it is to take the truly heroic moments out of the player's hands. The "plot bits" are told in cut scenes. In the cut scenes the protagonist undergoes a complete change in character from clueless idiot to master of the universe. It gives the game a story but it feels bogus.

Another solution is to make the game so open ended that the player can make their own story as they go along. But great stories have a plot that is carefully thought through and follows certain patterns. Unless you build lots of great plots into your game, you won't end up with a story -- just a bunch of stuff happening to the player. That's what most RPGs or open world games feel like.

The final solution -- the one that actually works -- was created about 100 years ago by Arthur Conan Doyle. His great innovation was to write stories where nothing much happened to the protagonist. Sherlock Holmes stories don't rely on interesting things happening to the Sherlock and Watson -- Sherlock is just a way of gradually revealing a story that happened to other people. Nobody had thought of this before.

The villain is a few steps ahead of the protagonist throughout the game, until the final act when they meet and there's a showdown.

How to write an adventure game plot

Let's get down to business. What do you need to write an adventure game plot? Here are the essentials:

1. An evil villain with tremendous powers. An evil genius scientist who experiments on animal brains.
2. Some nasty goal that the villain is trying to achieve. He wants to control the world.
3. Some method for the villain to achieve that goal. He's going to switch the brains of humans with the brains of dogs -- stupid, loyal, trainable.
4. Some reason for the protagonist to get involved. The villain has stolen John Magnet's beloved Shih-Tzu for his cruel experiments.

At first, all the protagonist / player knows is that his dog's been stolen and he wants it back. As the game progresses, he starts to find out more and more about why. The stakes get higher and higher. Eventually, after loads of aimless wondering about, the player figures out the whole plan and he manages to get into the villain's secret underground laboratory.

And then... the tables turn, the villain captures the protagonist and is about to experiment on him! The protagonist and the shih-tzu's brains are switched! The final act has the player controlling the body of the shih-tzu, trying to get the brains switched back around so that the plan can be stopped once and for all.

It's this final act in an adventure game where even the best ones seem a little forced. You have the evil genius standing by their mind control machine cackling for as long as it takes for the player to win. It could be days. However, it does give the story a satisfying ending so that's a price worth paying.

Now go away and make up a story. But first retweet this and post a comment.