Adventure Gamers - Forums

Hail Adventurers!

My buddies and I at Nogoodnik Games have just released our first attempt at a 2D point-and-click adventure game called The 3 Beards. It’s a short prototype inspired by the classic Lucasarts games and is intended to be a light-hearted, fun experience with a bit of basic puzzle solving included.

The story focuses on three guys whose car has broken down on a lonely mountain road. With the sun setting and no phone reception, the guys need to get the car working again or face certain doom!

The teaser trailer is available here:

It is available for PC and Mac at nogoodnikgames.itch.io/the-3-beards

Being our first attempt at making a game we really wanted to put something out for people to play and just get some feedback on it from adventure gamers. We have some plans for bigger projects in the works, but we don’t want to launch into something too big before we get a good handle on the craft of developing a good game.

Things that would be great to know:
- What were your overall impressions of the game?
- What did you think of the look of the game?
- What did you think of the sound of the game?
- How did it feel to play- nice and responsive? Slow and clunky?
- How were the scenario & puzzles set up- did you know what you were supposed to do?
- What did you think of the UI?
- Any other feedback you have.

Here are a couple of screenshots:

Thanks!

I like the artwork! Well done so far

Hopefully i’ll be able to check it out tonight and provide some feedback. Otherwise this weekend

OK I played it.

My opinion: It’s a very nice start! Here’s some feedback based on my opinion (obviously). :-D

First the good:

1. I liked the background music a lot. It seemed to fit nicely.
2. I also think the art is great. the backgrounds are very nice.
3. Animations are a bit puppet-on-a-stringy, but i personally could live with that.

Then the bad:

1. However obvious the items may seem (both on-screen as well as in the inventory), I’d expect a name of the item on a mouse hover. So that i’m 100% it is what i think it is. For instance, when i cut the bushes i wasn’t sure i was looking at a waterhose.

2. The hovering name onscreen would also help determine that you’re in fact properly selecting the target object when using an item. A couple of times I thought i was targeting an object when in fact i misclicked.

3. It felt a bit weird that i couldn’t target the generator until i talked with the bearded friend.

4. I feel the character walks a bit too slow. In this setting it’s alright but when you try stuff and have to move back and forth i think the movement speed will become annoying. a biiiiiit faster if you ask me. Or maybe make him move a bit faster when you double click. Just an idea :-)

5. I’m not a big fan of pixel-hunting myself. As such i would appreciate an option like they added in the remastered Monkey Island 2 and Day of the tentacle: A quickkey to highlight all objects you can interact with.

6. When moving into the cave it seemed a bit odd that the arrows to enter didn’t trigger all the way to the right side of the screen.

7. When talking to the bearded friend outside the background zooms in. While i liked this effect, i did think it looked too pixelated. Maybe you could resolve this by adding a blur filter that also does a fair deal of pixel resampling (?)

Thank you Bitano!

That’s great feedback and very useful. Apologies for the slow reply, I was out of town for a few days.

So to your points:

- That’s a great suggestion to have an item name on mouse hover, at least in the inventory. The item you mentioned is definitely guilty of being vague and the ‘look at’ description in the inventory doesn’t give any useful info on what the thing is either which is bad. I like having the player look at the object in the game world to determine what it is, as that gives more space for characterisation, humour and clue-giving but once you’ve picked it up it should be absolutely clear what it is. If the player needs to ‘look at’ the object in order to get a description I think the UI should give a clearer distinction between ‘pick up’ and ‘look at’.

- I also agree about misclicking on a target when using an item. We discussed this and in future we intend to have the item glow when you are on target. It was one of a few things that didn’t get implemented into The 3 Beards prior to our deadline.

- On that topic we’ve discussed whether or not to have an option to highlight all interactive elements on screen. I think these days it’s probably expected and therefore should at least be an option for the player to choose. Then again I think good design should (theoretically) make it an unnecessary function. Having the option there would be a good back-up in case the design isn’t as effective as it should be though.

- Having said that, puzzle design is something I think we can work on improving quite a bit. Other people have had similar experiences about not being able to interact with certain things in ways that seem obvious etc. Being a learning project our puzzle design process was more “can we connect a series of interactions to create a functional puzzle sequence” than crafting a really well designed puzzle. One of the areas we will focus on improving is designing for the player and probably a more focused playtesting phase.

- Great feedback on character speed. That’s something I want to spend a bit of time greyboxing before we move on to another project. Since so much time in a Point & Click is spent walking around, the walk speed & animations need to feel really nice. We also want to experiment with additional walk cycles to convey the character’s mood and just working on general polish with that.

- Thanks for pointing out the pixelation on the closeup. I’ve had another look and I can see what you mean. We’ll make note to use higher res background assets next time!

I’ll save a copy of your feedback and share it with the team. Thanks again for taking the time to play The 3 Beards give us your thoughts!

You’re welcome! And those are some good ideas in your reply.

Just keep in mind that (I’m assuming) your players will originate from other countries as well. Some items may not be as familiar to them as they are to you. Having easy access to a name allows the player to look up these items on the internet.

I remember having to look up a funnel when playing DOTT. I was a bit younger then and the funnel wasn’t drawn that clearly in inventory (or maybe it was but i didn’t recognize it). Also i hadn’t used a funnel before and as a kid I didn’t know what the word meant. I know…blame my parents…But I’m just flagging it up as something to keep in mind

Funnel in the cabinet (bit unclear)

Funnel in the inventory

That’s a good point Bitano, thanks for the reminder.

You’re right about that funnel- I can barely even see it in the cabinet!

I am planning to play DOTT Remastered pretty soon actually, I’ll take notes of what does & doesn’t work.

Thanks again!

From the trailer it looks good - I don’t like the hyper stylised graphics in general too much but I quite liked yours as yours were on the lighter scale.

Thanks Burge.

In an earlier version of the prototype the characters were a bit more realistic-looking but they felt a bit stiff and dull to watch. We tried to push the design a bit more so they were more fun but hopefully not too over-the-top.

Here’s an example of how the characters developed.