I think you should move this site feedback forum to the bottom of the forums so the Hangout comes up higher. The Hangout goes more toward building community and friendships among the members, and the Site Feedback should ideally have few to no posts. 

Thanks for listening 

There are a few members in this forum who already have developed their own adventure games.

How about you?
Have you ever dreamt of developing your own game, planning to try it, or already working on something?

Many years ago you needed to develop your own engine/code to be able to create such a game. Then we got Adventure Game Studio (AGS) and other tools, some of them based on Flash. Then Visionaire Studio. And Adventure Creator or PowerQuest for Unity, and there is Godot, or Unreal. Lots of options. A simple text adventure / interactive fiction can be realized easily with Twine, another tool available for free.

Developing a game is still difficult when you want to have a good and complex story and/or fresh ideas for puzzles or interactions that are supposed to be enjoyed by players (and not be boring or frustrating). Or when you need graphics. There are LLM/"AI" Tools nowadays, but those come with other - ethical - issues.

And of course, there are many adventures we can just enjoy, without adding our own. 
But maybe everyone of us has some story to tell that could be told as an interactive adventure?

So, have you ever tried developing a game, or even completed one, or would you like to try it?

Scotland, 1926. The suicide of his father leads David Gordon to his family's ancestral home for the first time in his life. Soon his life is at stake, threatened by dark secrets that have already cost many Gordons before him their sanity. https://store.steampowered.com/app/581300/Black_Mirror/

“The worst game of my life!” was written in the Steam reviews, which I couldn't understand. I enjoyed a very entertaining and simple game that had some annoying elements.

And that was mainly the controls: WASD is always very imprecise for me, which is bad when you need to control precisely. I needed save games three times (https://www.adventurespiele.net/CmodsDow...d-2629.htm) because the constant deaths annoyed me. However, this also meant that I missed out on achievements, because you only get them by playing.
The puzzles were very easy, except for one. I'm quoting from the walkthrough (https://www.adventurespiele.net/9891/BlackMirror4.pdf)

TrPage 10
In the top drawer, you will find what you were looking for. It is a note.
Take a closer look at it in the inventory and turn it over to the front with the mouse button pressed. On it are
two equations with the symbols you saw above the combination lock. For simplicity's sake,
we assign letters to the symbols:
The two arrowheads pointing away from each other = a
The triangle standing on its tip = b
The symbol resembling an M = c
The hourglass lying on its side = d
The desk note now contains the following equations:
1. b + a + b = 5
2. d - c = 2
That won't get you very far, because you have four unknowns but only two equations. So take another look at your father's letter.
Examine it more closely in your inventory and then turn the piece of paper
with the mouse button pressed so that you can see the symbol equations on the back.

3. a + b = 4
4. 9 = c + a
With this information, you can now start calculating. Begin with the third equation:
a + b = 4 |(-b)
a + b - b = 4 - b
a = 4 - b
Insert this into the first equation.
b + (4 - b) + b = 5
b + 4 - b + b = 5
b + 4 = 5 | (-4)
b + 4 - 4 = 5 - 4
b=1

You then insert this into the third equation:
a + 1 = 4 |(-1)
a + 1 - 1 = 4 - 1
a = 3
Continue with the fourth equation:
c + a = 9
c + 3 = 9 | (-3)
c + 3 - 3 = 9 - 3
c = 6
Now insert the result for c into the second equation:
d - c = 2
d - 6 = 2 | (+6)
d - 6 + 6 = 2 + 6
d=8

You then insert this into the third equation:
a + 1 = 4 |(-1)
a + 1 - 1 = 4 - 1
a = 3
Continue with the fourth equation:
c + a = 9
c + 3 = 9 | (-3)
c + 3 - 3 = 9 - 3
c = 6
Now insert the result for c into the second equation:
d - c = 2
d - 6 = 2 | (+6)
d - 6 + 6 = 2 + 6
d = 8This gives us the following symbols:
The two arrowheads pointing away from each other = a = 3
The triangle standing on its tip = b = 1
The symbol resembling an M = c = 6
The hourglass lying on its side = d = 8
The order of the symbols was carved above the combination lock: a c b d. The code is therefore:
3 6 1 8"

For my part, I didn't even understand the solution, and why a puzzle is so out of the ordinary is beyond me.
The characters are all unsympathetic, but they are Gordon's, after all, and there is something about the way they all murder each other. And then there's Leah: a doctor in the 1920s, which is implausible. How she got to the castle without a car remains unclear. She doesn't behave like a doctor either: “Oh, I must help her, she's dying!” only to then run after David, acting at best as a living candlestick and at worst blocking the way. (Anyone who found Watson annoying in the Holmes games knows what I mean.)

The castle itself was not exactly built by a practical person, and I always felt sorry for the staff who had to carry the food across the entire hall to the dining room. Oh well.


Conclusion

A restrained game whose ghosts are not scary, but dangerous and require quick reactions.

Time to pick the next community playthrough!

edit: you can still sign up as a leader, just post a comment below.

Which games have you personally played and enjoyed enough to recommend?

I specifically want to know of games with multiple endings.

Along with an approximate amount of endings that are included.

Thanks in advance. 

I follow two great adventure game podcasts: Podcasts | Adventure Game Hotspot (of course) and Adventure Games Podcast.

I found this one searching around, but it seems to be inactive (although the associated YouTube channel is still active):  YakWaxLips - YouTube

Anyone know of any others?

I got to do a podcast, first time ever!

We talk about creating games and my two games that are now on Steam, Intrigue At Oakhaven and Haunting At Cliffhouse.

Check it out here:

https://youtu.be/yFz3kADraik?si=Gdl3ecCckk_WO8Ub

I'm working on a big project about the 1998 FMV game Black Dahlia. In addition to doing my usual "Fair & Balanced" bullshit video where I just rant about the game, I've also been doing interviews with the cast and crew for a "making of" mini-documentary, as well as cutting together a 4 hour movie of all the FMV scenes.

I'm hoping to also get some soundbites from people who actually bought and played the game when it was released. I'm sure the game has fans out there somewhere, even though it wasn't terribly popular upon its release, and I would be very keen to hear from people who played it and still have fond memories of it.

I want to bring Black Dahlia back in a big way. If you want to be part of this multi-tiered deep-dive retrospective and if you have valuable insights to offer as a fan of the game, then please let me know. I'm especially looking for people who want to be interviewed for the mini-documentary I'm putting together to flesh out the perspective of those who actually played it back in the day.

The setting, style and tone for non-gameplay aspects influence even what kind of puzzles end up making sense.  Ofcourse they also really influence just the whole experience. For tone and style, we have cartoony games vs. semi-cartoony vs realistic games, where the former tends to have wackier tones and the last more serious tones, but not always. In terms of general types of settings, there's the ones I placed in the Poll. What I mean here is not something specific as ''It's takes place in Venezuela'' but more broader types of settings.

Personally, I think my favorite is the horror one as well as the little surreal abstract dream like sections. I'm not super big on most horror movies unless they're on the more psychological side. But I just like dark, thrilling tones. The Cat Lady/Downfall (original and remake) and The White Chamber were some I really liked.
Another favorite for me is the mystery/detective side of things.  I have fond memories of watching my mom play CSI games, I know they're not considered the best but I have a soft spot for them .

edit: Modern supernatural or fantasy can both go for urban fantasy like Unavowed! Depends on which aspect you align with more. The horror one may be more like a really broad ''theme'' but you get the idea, it tends to effect the vibe of the whole game a lot I mean there's even people into horror in general regardless of the type of game, but I'm not really into horror games in general.

I'm not sure if this incident is very well known outside of North America, or even through most parts of the US outside of the Great Lakes region, but today marks the 50th anniversary of the sinking of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald in Lake Superior and I've been thinking about it a lot, so now you're stuck reading about it.

The ship was a massive 700-foot American freighter that got caught in a hurricane-strength storm (not technically a hurricane, but the Great Lakes are so huge they have their own violent weather systems that can rival the oceans) and went down suddenly in Canadian waters with all 29 men aboard without even a final distress call.

Surely not the biggest of naval catastrophes in the world, but perhaps one of the best known because it was immortalized by singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot in his haunting folk ballad "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald." I'm old enough to have grown up with the song, and to this day it remains hugely influential in driving interest to the museum in the region that honours the fallen sailors.

The ship has been found but the exact cause of the wreck still isn't known, and further expeditions are largely forbidden. The waters are so cold there that the ship and its crew are still largely preserved, so it's essentially considered a graveyard at sea.

Anyway, it's a fascinating story, and a gut-wrenching tribute song by Lightfoot if you've never heard it. I encourage you to have a listen, and I can't imagine anyone not being moved by it.

Fun fact: The song was recorded only a month or so after the sinking, and the recording was not just from a single take, but the very first take, and even more incredibly, the very first time they actually played it together in full. The drummer didn't even know when to come in, waiting for Lightfoot to nod as a cue, and it went on so long without that he thought Lightfoot had forgotten! They did a few more takes after that, but none captured the magic of that very first attempt.



And as a special bonus, here's a fairly new music video with a cover of the song by an a capella group called Home Free. I was initially skeptical that anyone could do the song justice, but dang they dun good!