I'm a fan of the old 90's style point and click adventure games!

I really like their focus on characters, story, exploration, observation, humor, and pressure free gameplay!

…..but I don't like having to find a cup to fill with water to extinguish a fire, when there's a vase right infront of me!

……nor do I like finding out that the way to hit a button which is 3 meters out of reach is with a yoyo, unless It's been made clear that this yoyo belongs to a giant!

Neither of those things feel good at all! and everybody agrees!

We want the things we see in an adventure game to work just the way they work in real life! (or in line with a cartoon logic which has first been made clear! ie; if you've been shown that a bull can be a bullhorn in this game, then it's ok for a monkey to be a monkeywrench)

So let's start making Adventure Games, played with a controller in a 3d environment, with real time physics, where you can pick up everything and use it in whatever way you like to get the job done, in accordance to the laws of physics, or the clearly expained cartoon logic!

…………..

Let's say you're a silly little Moneky, who lives in a zoo with takes up the totality of an offshore island, and one night while all the zoo keepers are back on the mainland a comet smashes the bridge and the docks, leaving you and the rest of thee animals without care, and so you find a way out of your cage and now you've got to help all the animals!

….and the Tapirs have no water………

You have a hose but from the nearest tap it doesn't reach….. unless you take it through a building and out the window that you've proped open to stop from closing!

or maybe you decide to fill a water tank and slowly drag it up all the stairs to push it off the roof into their enclosure!?

or you could set up a zip line and send it down from a different roof that doesn't require you to drag the full/heavy tank so far?

or you could craft together a pulley system, and lift it over their fence with that!?

or set it on a seesaw facing the fence, then jump off the roof onto it and send it flying over the fence!?

or find a way to get the little zoo buggy, fill that with some wood, construct a jump, then stick the water tank on the back, and jump the fence!?

or maybe there's just a longer hose somewhere!?

or maybe you forgot to turn it fully on, and if you do, with the increased pressure you could reach them!?

or can you remember seeing any coconuts anywhere, they say they like them, and you have a stong hammer!?

or maybe you could find a way to bring them to the water!?

or if you can help the gorrila out, he can easily throw the water tank over the fence!?

Who knows!? but if it makes sense in your mind, you can do it in the game! (Ideally)

……….

(this is obviously alot easier said than programmed)

Thoughts!?

Blackberry said:
I'm a fan of the old 90's style point and click adventure games! I really their focus on characters, story, exploration, observation, humor, and pressure free gameplay!

I remember well what i liked about it: The interface of forming commands from verbs and objects raised the impression that i con do anything in the game, whatever i can come up with.

Blackberry said:
…..but I don't like having to find a cup to fill with water to extinguish a fire, when there's a vase right infront of me!

This is where above illusion breaks. It sucks. But it does not break the whole game, only a moment.

Blackberry said:
So let's start making Adventure Games, played with a controller in a 3d environment, with real time physics, where you can pick up everything and use it in whatever way you like to get the job done, in accordance to the laws of physics

Yeah, let's try this. But there are very serious issues along our way and even if we get there.
1. It's hardly possible to make an intuitive interface so the player can express any action, e.g. constructing a pully from a rope and gears the player has in his inventory. To set up such machine in a editor, we need 3D gizmos, tuning many parameters, connecting nodes, and expert knowledge. Far too complicated to expose such stuff to the player.
2. Assuming the player can do anything, he can also overcome our given constraints, breaking our game. We lock a door - player uses explosives to force it open. We introduce a princess which the games story is all about - player kills her on first sight.
3. Assuming the player can do anything, he can also change the static story. NPC will fail to adapt, since they are not truly intelligent. Your story and dialogue is static, even if it has branches. To allow full player freedom, you need dynamic and adaptive story. (We might now get ther using AI, but i would not wonder if we would realize at this point: 'Ok finally i can do really anything in the game, and i wanted this all the time, but now i realize it's pointless and not really what i wanted.')

Blackberry said:
Who knows!? but if it makes sense in your mind, you can do it in the game! (Ideally)

But you (as the dev) do not know what crazy stuff i (the player) will come up with to break your game. And i won't have fun in a broken game, even if i can do anything.
It's no longer a game then, but rather just a physics sandbox.

Blackberry said:
(this is obviously alot easier said than programmed)

Yes, but maybe it is not desireable anyway, as i try to say.
It depends on how far you want to go ofc.

Personally, i look at it this way:
It's great wif we can give players more options. It's great to spur creativity and imagination of the player.
This way we can achieve progress and new games. So we should do it.
But we can not have an unlimited reality simulation and a game at the same time. A game requires limitations to impose challenges and problems to the player, but also to set some story where needed.
It's important to realize the limitations are not a bad thing in general, but actually assential to achieve actual entertainement.

As a programmer i want to lift all limitations, but as a game designer i want to impose many of them.
(This philosophy helps me a bit to tame endless programmer ambuitions. : )

Blackberry said:
(this is obviously alot easier said than programmed) Thoughts!?

I once found that some players have fun by designing the most deadly amusements parks in roller coaster games.

I think if you ever realize this, the largest source of fun would be to mess around in the game and find cases that shouldn't be working or cases that should but don't.

Cheers for the reply!

…..“I remember well what i liked about it: The interface of forming commands from verbs and objects raised the impression that i con do anything in the game, whatever i can come up with.”

Yeah, now let's capture/expand upon that, with the technology from 2024!

…..you then go on to talk about how it's impossible to create a game that replicates the infinite complexes of life…

and you're right! We will never do that! but we strive for it anyway! Forever getting more complex, but forever falling short of reality! That's life!

We'll never get there, but still let's strive into uncharted territory, and do our best in creating hopefully "The Most Complex Physic System Ever Seen In A Video Game!” (not an easy task at

…..you then talk about how the player could use an object to break the game…

Only if we fail as designers! We need to make sure that there's no access to explosives if we don't want them having it! (granted, probably not an easy task in a very complicated game like this)

And we can also still impose limitations if we choose! So if the player has a knife is his hand and is waving it towards the princess we can stop him and have him say to himself “I can't go waving that around the princess, I might hurt her" to make sure he doesn't!

…..

We don't have to eat a whoke elephant to begin with! and we shouldn't, we should just bite off what we chew! But there's always something we can chew!

And this is what modern technology is calling for!

Alberth said:

Blackberry said:
(this is obviously alot easier said than programmed) Thoughts!?

I once found that some players have fun by designing the most deadly amusements parks in roller coaster games.

I think if you ever realize this, the largest source of fun would be to mess around in the game and find cases that shouldn't be working or cases that should but don't.

As I said to the other guy, I don't expect that it'll ever be perfect man! But I have no doubt that we could do this "reality simulator" to some degree!

Anybody remember this??

Blackberry said:
We'll never get there, but still let's strive into uncharted territory, and do our best in creating hopefully "The Most Complex Physic System Ever Seen In A Video Game!” (not an easy task at

Personally i think physics is the sleeping princess of gaming. Nothing seems more promising than that, and i agree.

But why is the princess sill sleeping? Physics simulation was touted to be the next big thing in the early 2000's, but it was used very rarely and never became a dominating trend. Why not?

So let's analyze history…

1. Super Mario. You can pick up objects and carry them with you. Objects can be thrown and placed. They can be used as weapons, to build a staircase to reach a higher platform, or interact with static objects like a key opening a door.
2. Half Life 2. Same thing, but now in 3D.
3. Penumbra (Trilogy starting at 2007, first person adventure game). Same thing, but physics became the primary mechanic to interact with anything. Remarkable controls - you can drag a drawer open or pull levers by moving the mouse. Everything feels like a real physical object, raising immersion to a totally new level. It's almost 20 years old now, but still the game with the most advanced and integrated physics simulation.

I would not put Portal on this list, because it does only the ‘usual’ Super Mario things and did not surpass HL2 regarding Physics simulation.
TIM and similar physics puzzlers might be worth to mention, but in any case: Physics did not became a widespread gamplay mechanics in games. They use it for ragdolls to give realistic death animations. They put some passive crates around which fly off on explosions, and eventually you can carry and stack them, but that's it.

This is disappointing. Why is it that way? What's the problem with physics simulation?
Well, i can only guess for the reasons:

Physics simulation is hard. Objects jitter, or tunnel through each other. They might fall through the floor and get lost. Players might get stuck below a pile of crates.
It's not reliable, and so most devs tone it down to minimize potential issues which are otherwise hard to detect and even harder to solve. Related ‘solutions’ are mostly just hacks, which work in some cases but can make others even worse.

Using physics simulation is hard. For example, the first thing you might do is picking objects up and carry them with you, like the crates in Portal. But the player can rotate very quickly using mouse look, so you get the problem of the carried object lagging back in time. The related control problem is not trivial to solve.
Even then, the carried object might interact badly with others. For example, if you pusk it against a wall, it might start to jitter wildly. Games like HL2 tried to hide the issues by using a force field of a gravity gun to hold an object. So the player thinks the jitter is a result of the magic force field. Dead Space did the same.
Only Penumbra managed to make carried objects feel like holding them robustly with your own hands.

Physics engines have limited accuracy. Joints connecting a heavy and a light weight objects might break or behave weired. Stress can cause solver explosions. Objects might keep sinking slowly into the floor. Controlling physics objects precisly is difficult, since we should do so only by external forces or joint motors, but we should not set velocity directly or teleporting them around for best results.

So yeah, i think the princess is still sleeping becasue she is hard to wake.
For me personally the most progress came unexpected and coincidentally. I've worked on my own physics engine initially, but then Havok offered a free version of their engine and i've used that for a while. I also had used Math Engine and ODE before to compare results with my own stuff.
When Havok was no longer free, i was looking for some open source alterantives. I've tried Bullet, but it's accuracy and robustness was much worse than Havok. So i've also tried a closed source library, Newton Dynamics. I did not expect much from an engine made by a single guy in his spare time, but i found out his engine somehow does not have all those typical problems. It's super accurate and robust, maening it can do a lot of things other engines simply can't. Jitter happens only very rarely, large mass ratios work, and performance is comparable to other engines and often better.
So i kept support for both Newton and Bullet, but then Newton become open source i have removed Bullet since it could not compete the quality of Newton.
After learning more about the engine, i found out i can program my own joints with motors, and it's very flexible, pretty easy and intuitive.
Using this, i could do the impossible, giving my old dream another try: Self-balancing and walking ragdolls.
And it works. This would have been totally impossible with any other engine i have tried, but Newton can do it.

Sorry for the long story, but i tell you: Choice of physics engine matters.
But using off the shelf game engines like Unity or Unreal, you don't have a choice. Which is the primary reason i do not consider those game engines. Their physics solutions are not accurate and robust enough for my needs, but they can't be replaced easily.

Blackberry said:
or maybe you decide to fill a water tank and slowly drag it up all the stairs to push it off the roof into their enclosure!?

This one is probably not yet possible. I saw some PhysX demos combining fluid and rigid body simulation, but while impressive this is just too expensive to be practical.
Try to reduce your ideas to rigid bodies. Some engines also support soft bodies and cloth, but millions of fluid particles in a box which you can carry around is somethign i might not see happenign within my lifetime. Companies like NVidia just show off such stuff to convince peopel on spending way too much money for huge GPUs.

Blackberry said:
or maybe you forgot to turn it fully on, and if you do, with the increased pressure you could reach them!?

Similar issue. If you want water puzzles, you likely need abstract approximations to fake the water. But it's worth the effort only if the water is a primary mechanic in your game.

(I just assume you have 3D in mind. In 2D, full scene fluid simulation is totally possible.)

Blackberry said:
(this is obviously alot easier said than programmed)

Yeah, it's hard both on the programming and the design side.

But it needs to be done. Good luck! \:D/

Oh definitely, I had a lot of fun playing that.

That game however is not aiming to make a real-world realistic simulation. It's has a fixed set of elements, and interactions between them.

Walls are solid, even with dynamite. Cats just get scared of an exploding dynamite, etc.

The simple physics together with the quick and easy experimenting setup, it invites to try and beat the problem. As you play you find mechanics of the game. I think this is to a large extent what makes the game fun for a large audience.

Adding fully realistic physics would harm the game, as the player has to consider much more things that they may not be aware of (weight of the rope, strength of the chain, food and endurance of the mice, not scaring the cat away or killing it, etc etc).

In essence the game is about “living” in an imaginary world, and the fun is to figure out how it works. People that are good in these games can often reason within rule sets that are different from real-world rules.

As long as a rule-set is clear, it doesn't matter what it is, I think. Consistency within the rule-set is needed to make it convincing, but otherwise arbitrary limits can be created.

Your introductory example with the vase is perhaps thus not about lack of real physics but a broken set rules in the game instead. That is, if the game would have made clear that a vase cannot carry be used to extinguish a fire beforehand, would you ever consider using that object to put out the fire?

Alberth said:
Adding fully realistic physics would harm the game, as the player has to consider much more things that they may not be aware of (weight of the rope, strength of the chain, food and endurance of the mice, not scaring the cat away or killing it, etc etc).

That goes both ways. In current games enemies have no momentum, and they twitch around randomly in impossible ways. Real physics are much more predictable than that.

@ JoeJ

I haven't heard of Penumbra, I'll have to check it out.

…you've surely seen the new Zelda Game; Tears of the Kingdom. The game has a strong focus on engineering, with quite a solid system, that's partially inspired this kind of thinking in me.. and it received alot of praise for it, which shows others really like the idea.

Yeah physics engines are certainly complicated, and at a certain point (with the water (I was thinking of fake water for this game) and stuff) impossible with current technology……. But there's also plenty that is possible!

So why is the princess still sleeping?

……because the time/cost that it takes to create these systems (especially for the first time) requires a payoff that's more than just a fancy exploring barrel of apples in the background….. it needs a game where the physics is central!

A game like what I have describe!

A pitch that would be hard to get past the executives! (or a very difficult job for an indie team)

But a game that I think could be a huge success! (if done properly)

@Alberth

You're right, a traditional graphic adventure game without physics can still be a good (and much cheaper) game as long as there's a clear logic to it!

(I'm actually currently desing one myself like this. though there will be some playful platforming..)

…..but the physics would certainly add a whole other dimension to it! (They don't have to be real life physics! ……in this monkey game I'm thinking of, you can jump off the roof without breaking your bones, and you can carry heavier things than a monkey could in real life, and there's a toy kite that you can glide around with (is that possible??). it's fairly cartoony)

and again, it is, and always will be, just a game! not an alternative universe!

I have no delusions about that!

I know that there'll always be limitations to the engine!

….and sometimes I may impose them myself, and say, remove the system that makes a rope snap if I tied too much to it, for the sake of a more simple game! Do we want wind (that is anything more than asthetics) in this game? probably not..