Next month will be ridiculously busy for me so I made a quick little zine about modern games using FMV for the Zine Month alternative jam using Electric Zine Maker
If you're interested in making #Twine into an FVM engine in spite of itself - which is actually useful for fast #FMV#AdventureGame prototyping - @MichaelKlamerus has assembled all the links for my tutorial on doing just that.
When the use of cd-roms for games became mainstream in the 90s, there was a massive explosion of people taking advantage of all that extra space by adding full motion video to their games. A lot of great games were released during this time but it became a short lived trend since there were also a lot of bad games released. Having grown up playing a lot of these games, I’m now (mostly unironically) a fan of FMV in games and love seeing what new games are using it on Steam and Itch. While FMV can limit what kind of games can be made, I think it also has advantages. Video of real people or things can possibly help players connect to the story being told and even low budget or bad FMV can be charming. While it sounds intimidating to record something for a game, it doesn’t mean it must be a big production and there are a lot of tools to easily add video to your game.
Adventure Game Studio
Adventure Game Studio is a free and open source game engine for making point-and-click adventure games. While most games made with the engine are 3rd person adventure games, the engine can be used in a variety of ways. This excellent tutorial by Space Quest Historian shows how someone who has never used AGS before can make a first-person game that uses FMV. Even if you have no interest in using AGS, there’s some good advice in here.
Anyone can record video for a game as long as you have a smartphone. Making FMV doesn’t mean you need to have massive camera, people doing makeup and lighting, and a cast of actors. I’ll talk about it later but last year I made a game with my cat and an iPhone.
Plan all the video you’re shooting in advance – Make sure you know everything you’ll have to film before you start shooting your game. It will be a massive headache to go back and get more video once you’re halfway through coding the game and realize that you forgot to film something.
Organize your videos – Make sure you have a good folder structure and naming scheme for your videos. If you have a lot of little video clips, it can quickly become overwhelming to figure out what videos are used for what.
Charles Engine for Unity
If you are more interested in doing a Choose Your Own Adventure/branching narrative game, I can recommend the Charles Engine plugin for Unity as an option. The Charles Engine was made by Charles Games, developer of games like Attentat 1942 and Svoboda 1945. I made a very tiny FMV game using this plugin with my cat last year and while I would maybe recommend having an actor less difficult to direct than a cat, making a game with the plugin was very easy and the engine provides an easy to use tool to plot out all the nodes and branching that your interactive story will use. But the plugin can do more than just interactive movies and the tutorial that comes with the plugin has you eventually creating a game set on a fake computer desktop, kind of like making your own version of Her Story.
a picture of my cat and asking if she stole my chicken nuggetsA screenshot of the game I made with Charles EngineNarrat Narrat is a lovely tool for making interactive fiction games, with a layout that seems to be inspired by RPGs like Disco Elysium. But that’s not all it can do. The creator of the engine also made A Walk Through the Forest, a short interactive fiction game where you walk on a trail through a forest while the narrator talks about their personal thoughts. Parts of the game can have you looking at video of parts of the trail. Narrat also has integration with Godot if you prefer to work in that engine. Hopefully one of the takeaways from this post is that your game doesn’t even need to have people in it, it can just be video of nature or animals.
plan 9 from outer space playing inside of TwineTwine can play video like this clip from Plan Nine From Outer SpaceI hope this post was useful and you’ll consider putting video in your next game, whether it’s a personal story or a total schlock fest. If there’s other tools that you use for this type of thing, please let me know in the comments!
Not indie game related, unless you count indie game soundtracks, but today is Bandcamp Friday so consider buying some music. Spotify really doesn’t pay anything and buying music (or at least use a streaming service that pays better royalties) is the only way they can really keep doing this for a living.
The Lawnmower Man
In the early 90s it felt like the film adaptation of The Lawnmower Man had a video game on every single platform so it makes me happy that there is now one for PICO-8.
Markus Ritter – Ghosts of the Past Markus Ritter – Ghosts of the Past is a FMV point-and-click adventure game described by the developers on the Steam page as “queer cheesy trash” and that is a 100% accurate description. Fortunately I am a goblin for FMV trash, especially ones inspired by Gabriel Knight 2, so this is absolutely for me. That said, it is EXTREMELY cheesy and might be too much for some people, so I would maybe recommend playing the free prequel game first to see if it’s your thing.
Madvent Calendar 4 – End of the Line
Since it’s December, we also have a new Madvent calendar from the HauntedPS1 community. Every year they release a free anthology of small horror games with a Playstation 1 aesthetic, with a new one unlocked each day. They’re really nice collections and it’s impressive that they manage to put together one of these every year and for free.
Pretty easy to imagine a future #FMV/Myst/Riven adventure game where you move around in a 3D splatted environment, rather than clicking on still images or video loops.
Peter continues his look at Halloweeny Saturn games with The Mansion of Hidden Souls. Have you ever tried out this FMV adventure? Check out our thorough exploration of this ethereal, creepy title:
#PsychicDetective - a #FMV game I truly like! Not in a "so bad it's good" way. The plot is a strong dime novel. The acting is fine. The core gameplay is much more interactive than it appears at first. There are subtle, but significant ways to influence the plot, not just watch different scenes. Proof that this medium could work if done right.
You know what I dislike just as strongly as people dismissing anything "old" as automatically bad? Elitist retro-ists treating all kinds of later developments the same way. For instance, there are tons of people claiming "all #FMV games are crap". The presentation of things does not make or break a game. In each format, gems can be found. "Gem" probably doesn't describe #TheDameWasLoaded, but it is quite a decent game nevertheless.
I'm not one for "New Year's resolutions", but I am one for overly ambitious projects.
For 2023, Project365 is "One New Game Per Day".
Given that I have 634 unplayed games in my Steam account and {mumble} unredeemed bundle Steam keys, there's a reason my unplayed collection is tagged "Pile of Shame".
I'll pin this to my profile, and give a brief summary here each day (or x, if I miss x days due to work or stuff).
I'll play 15-30 minutes of (at least) one new game I've never played before (or played less than 15 minutes of). I'll give every game at least 15 minutes, even if I hate every minute of it.
I'm also open to suggestions; if you reply to this thread with a game, I'll schedule it, or tell you what I thought of it.
One of the things that's come up is that I have a bunch of games that I've played once, and not touched again.
Over the last 279 games, I felt like I'd played every type of game that's available. I've played games I would not normally choose to play.
Who Pressed Mute On Uncle Marcus is a FMV murder mystery, and the seventh game in the September Humble Choice Bundle, and the first FMV game I've reviewed this year.
The video quality is good, the actors are OK, and Uncle Marcus is played by Andy Buckley, arguably best known as David Wallace in the US version of The Office.
I won't spoil the storyline, but you're presented with choices to make which leads to a branching decision tree as you try to solve a murder in one night.
If you like Andy Buckley, and FMV games, you'll like this. If you don't like either or both, this probably won't be your cup of tea.
In any case, I'll probably end up playing this through, because I'm a bit meh about FMV games, but I do like Andy Buckley (he was great in Avenue 5 too).