Machinarium

While looking for inspirations for my FYP, I recalled this game, which has already been published some time ago. Played the demo, it's... awesome! (visually and storytelling-wise)

 

There's a pretty in-depth review about the game, certainly something worth thinking about when doing a point-and-click game.

Some excerpts from Jakub Dvorský's interviews:

Would you do a game without dialog again?

I'm a really bad writer. It's hard to tell a story without dialog, but it's our way.

More accessible for everybody i.e. children can't read.

Plus, when I was growing up (in the Czech Republic),

it was really difficult to read english point & click adventure games.

Dreamed of adventure games without any language.

--- (from here)  

And something that's similar conceptually from the previous game I was in, Waker:

I think that he does pretty well is interesting failure conditions. So, if you don't actually find the solution, something engaging still happens. What do you think of failure -- not failure, but partial solutions and failure and stuff like that? How do you consider those?

JD: I think it's important because it's obvious that you can't do everything right for the first time, so it must be funny to fail, basically. For the next game, we to try a new approach. We want to create a very playful game, which will feel like a toy that you can play with so you won't be focused only on the solution or finishing it but on playing it. It should be more about playing with the game, more than to solve it as soon as possible.

Yeah, because that particular scenario seemed like it was possible to figure out because you see these effects that are happening and they kind of lead the player along the way. A lot of adventure games wind up becoming just “try everything on everything else,” just click everything. Are you trying to move away from that?

JD: Yeah, a little. And also, it's nice to create difficult puzzles, because I think nowadays in some current adventure games, it's so easy to solve the puzzle. In the older adventure puzzles, it was very hard to finish the game without a walkthrough because there was an infinite amount of items in the inventory and an infinite amount of options to do.

Nowadays, everybody's trying to do it differently in the opposite way. So, now it's very obvious what to do and it's very easy to solve it almost without anything, so we try to make it something in between, and make it somewhat hard. There is no infinite amount of possibilities in each level because you have only a couple items in your inventory at a time, and you're not allowed to go to certain locations.

---(from here)

What advantages or attraction do you see with the point-and-click genre over others that have kept you producing these adventure titles?

JD: The narrative part -- the story, puzzles, characters and the whole micro-world itself -- are the most important things in adventure games. I prefer these things over game mechanics and tactics, which are the main elements of first-person shooters or real-time strategy games.

What can users expect to see in Machinarium that they didn't see in your previous games, or perhaps in any other titles in the genre?

JD: Compared to our older games, Machinarium will be bigger and more detailed. [It will have] a stronger story line, more logical puzzles, an inventory, and a couple of other new features, like mini-games and animated communication between characters. The main character, a little robot, will be able to walk freely around the locations and be telescopic.

Compared to other titles in the genre, I think we try to put a bigger emphasis on details and things which aren't in the main focus -- subtle animation jokes, music composed carefully for each location, and every building, character, or item in the game having its own history and meaning. We also try to think a little differently when designing the puzzles.

(from here)