Greg Chaffins 
I’ve had the great fortune of using personal computers since their inception. From the 8 bit days of the Pet and Apple II to today’s pocket wonders, the personal computer has been empowering the most important muscle in the human being – the mind. And one of those mechanisms the computer used to empower the human mind in the creative realm was the adventure game.
I loved the adventure game. It took the eternal escape medium, fiction, and brought it into the interactive (daresay, virtual) world. Through those 80 column displays a world was suddenly at your fingertips, ready to be explored.
With today’s ubiquitous computers, adventure games no longer need to be tied to the desktop. Thanks to mobile devices, it is a simple thing to explore a virtual world, to mastermind your own escape from places unknown, in small chunks of time that you steal from the real world. So it seemed natural for me to write adventure games for mobile devices.
My first adventure for the iPhone was an adventure based on the White House of the United States of America. Using maps of the actual building, I crafted a story that involved a typical scenario in adventure games – you were trapped in an unfamiliar location, and you needed to escape.
Making a fantastical story of an accidental tourist trapped by evil guys taking over the White House, the story led you to explore the facility and solve many puzzles by using what could be found, and your wits.
But as much as I enjoyed working on White House Escape, I wanted to do something more modern. White House Escape used images in a limited manner, but I wanted to have graphics that led the story, much as you would find in a graphic novel.
After going through many different ideas and screen mockups, I settled on a comic based format for a horror adventure I wanted to do. The adventure game would use three basic comic formats – one for the room the player was visiting, one for the items the player found and possibly used, and finally one for actions that took place during a player’s interaction within the game. It seemed to work.
I went about the job at hand, creating the adventure. For most adventure games I like to work from a map outward. This allows me to visualize the rooms needed, and also helps to segment the game into the crucial three phases – start, middle, and endgame.
After laying out the game and its locations, it was time to create the graphics. Playing with index cards, everything fell together quick enough, and soon Raving Manor was launched into the world. The game was centered around the manor of a brilliant doctor that went off the deep end, following the path that his wife went after the unfortunate death of their only child.
The player ends up in this nightmare after an unfortunate car breakdown, and seeking shelter from inclement weather is probably not the best of choices after the fact.
Raving Manor was well received, and I got a lot of wonderful feedback from many adventure game players. Several of the emails were requesting a classic adventure game, one without images. Now, I love the “theater of the mind” that text adventure games naturally employ, so the idea stuck with me.
After kicking around many different ideas, the thought of being trapped in a mystery ship at sea seemed like a great paradigm to explore. I was still enjoying the “horror” flavor of Raving Manor, so I incorporated that into the adventure. Being trapped at sea soon became trapped at sea in a mysterious haunted antique luxury liner, and the ideas started flowing.
After researching what a typical ocean cruiser should incorporate, I was able to create a map to work from. Now, a cruise ship has different levels, and these levels made it easy to confine and move the player between the different game stages. As the player seeks their escape, they discover the plot of a murderous love triangle and their own family history. Escape was to be discovered by looking inward as well as outward.
The game came to be known as “Escape from the Maiden’s Curse”, and soon the design was complete and it was time for the coding. By this time the iPad had been released, and I wanted the iOS titles to support both the iPhone devices as well as the iPad. The text based game actually worked well within the touch device paradigm, and I received many emails asking for hints above those published on the supporting website. People were playing it, and I was delighted.
By this time, I wanted to get back into a graphically based game. During the creation of Raving Manor I regretted not using this format with White House Escape – after all, what could be more interesting to visit via graphic novel than the White House? Well, the answer came quick enough – the West Wing. A comic based adventure that let you explore and escape the working headquarters of the United States would be fun. Plus, I already had the foundations of the story in White House Escape.
I decided to pick up the story where the former left off, and the game started in the Oval Office itself. The story about the occupation by the bad guys continued, but this time I wanted the player to have greater interaction with these guys. Soon the game layout was done, and the player would not only have to escape the West Wing, but also outsmart a variety of evil guards along the way.
Another feature I wanted to try in the game was a percent complete indicator. I thought it would be interesting to let the player know how far they were into the game, and by comparison know how important an action just taken was to game. I accomplished this by assigning weighted points to possible actions, and then calculating percent complete based on total actions taken to that point. It worked.
West Wing Escape was soon completed using many of the tools I used with Raving Manor, and it was launched for both the iPad and iPhone devices. But by this time I was hungry for seeing exactly what the iPad’s large screen and potential user interactivity could bring to an adventure game, and Doctor Raving was starting to invade my thoughts again. Raving Factory was inevitable.
Raving Factory built upon the character of the good doctor from Raving Manor, but I wanted to explore the depth of the character’s madness. How far would he go to right the perceived wrongs that he felt fate had dealt him? I looked for direction on the character, and decided that pulling him out of the usual surroundings and putting the character in the unexpected would serve as a great plot mechanism.
The good doctor was successful, and in happier times he enjoyed life, so why couldn’t he have invested his money in a toy factory? The creation of toys can at times be cutting edge, and it would be a great outlet for a mental giant such as our good doctor.
I had a character, and a location. But I did not have the plot that I needed to write the game. Suddenly I found inspiration in the most curious of places. I had told my 8-year-old son about the game I was writing ( a habit I still do – I love his perspective), and he soon presented me with a child’s drawing of an evil jack-in-the-box.
I could not believe that I had overlooked what now looked like the obvious. Jack would be the almost perfect antagonist, and his creation under the deranged hand of the good doctor just begged to be used. I had my plot.
Unlike the other adventures to date, I targeted the iPad first in the games creation. I wanted to see how well the game’s mechanics could be interacted with by the larger screen. Soon it became apparent that virtual controls were great – I could present the player with combinations locks they could twist, dials they could turn, and puzzle pieces they could move. I definitely wanted to incorporate these into the Raving Factory.
Once again working from a map, this time of an imaginary decrepit toy factory, I soon had the game designed. Graphics took longer than the other games, but the real time investment came in the actual coding of the different interactive elements.
Each one had to be tweaked for the right virtual feel, and once completed they had to be transposed to the iPhone side of things. Surprisingly it went okay, with the exception of a different scale for many elements due to the relative controller size (a finger, in this case).
Another interesting aspect of Raving Factory is that there was no player map. In the other adventures, the map was crucial in not only informing the player, but it was used in the touch environment to actually move the player. But with Raving Factory, a point and click style game, no map was required.
The player simply moved through rooms by touching doors or other elements as required. This change worked well, but it did create a refinement in the coding process. But soon enough it was done, and Raving Factory was released for iOS.
Now I am working on the next couple of adventures, and I am looking forward to seeing where they will lead. We definitely need to find out where Doctor Raving went after leaving a mess in Raving Factory, and I hope it will be a fun romp for players of the series.
