so i was in the shower...

...after a long day of playing Final Fantasy X-2, chatting with friends on AIM, and going through adventure-gaming websites, and an idea occurred to me as I pondered about making my own adventure game: why not make a Harry Potter adventure? Okay, so it's not really original, but what irks me about the official Harry Potter games published by Electronic Arts is that a) they are painfully mediocre and b) they utilize only a tiny fraction of the possible gameplay elements offered by the Harry Potter universe. In fact, when I took Intro to Interactive Multimedia back in freshman year, for the movie/book-to-game assignment I chose to do a Harry Potter adventure game. This was before the first movie and game came out, and although my design was not entirely groundbreaking (in fact, I had recently played GK 3 and had that on my mind), it would've made a far better game than the crap that came out of EA (I am mostly talking about the first game, not having played the second [slightly improved] one). What I want to do now is make an intelligent game worthy of the Potter name, albeit a small one. However, knowing me, this may never become a finished product. We'll see what happens.

To keep going on this topic, I'd have to introduce a phenomenon I recently discovered: independent freeware adventures. That is, a community of adventure-game fans are developing their own games, since PC adventures are few and far between these days. They use one of a few freely distributed adventure game engines for this purpose, and more info on these engines can be found on Adventure Gamers: Underground. These games are by and large 2D point-and-click adventures, so don't expect any groundbreaking gameplay here. However, they do contain strong narratives and fun inventory-based puzzles and also provide creative outlets for writers and artists. Later I shall do another entry on the best of these adventures I've played so far.

So this is what I'm thinking. I'm going to make a small game, since my graphics skills aren't that strong, and I'd rather work on fewer images and do them well. The story is not going to be Harry's story, nor will the plot follow any of the books'. I want to use either Hermione, Ron, (on second thought, they do enter the main stories quite heavily) or one of the minor Griffindor characters (a Neville Longbottom game!), and make him or her the main character. This allows me to make a smaller story that runs parallel to and occasionally intersect one of the books' plot. Now I have to figure where to get the background music from. Among other things.