I recently wrapped up playing Professor Layton and the Curious Village on my Nintendo DS. It’s an interesting title … probably won’t appeal to everyone, since not everyone digs brain teasers, but the highlight of the game for me wasn’t so much the collection of puzzles as the overall design vision behind the game. It’s packed full of unique-looking characters, gorgeous watercolor backgrounds, and really enjoyable dialog. It’s a simple mystery story (with a whole bunch of sub-mysteries) and it presents an ALARMING amount of opportunity for pedophile jokes, but I had a ton of fun playing it.
Definitely felt compelled to explore the entire village, clicking all over the place looking for hint coins (I finished with more than a hundred, and I used them fairly liberally throughout the game), talking to people over and over to make sure they’d given me all of their puzzles, and generally enjoying the overall look and feel of the game, which has that Harry Potter -esque “sort of for kids, sort of for adults” feel to it.
I wonder why more games don’t put this amount of thought and effort into their visual design, character design, and story design. Professor Layton basically proves that you can produce an entire game based around nothing more than existing brainteasers, and make it quite compelling, just by focusing on the little things. I’m looking forward to the sequel.
Now I need to get back to “My French Coach”
(note: I’m trying out comments on this post now that I have some spam protection in place, so feel free to leave one)
A comment.
Jenn and I tried this out at a kiosk for a little bit. The design aesthetic really does make the experience. I only got a puzzle or so in and it was likely the calm intro stuff so nothing really hooked me.
No DS for me though; I might try it on hers if she ever picks it up.
I think, and I’d imagine you know, the reason more games don’t do this is because its damned hard and takes talented folk. Creating a solid and thorough visual design is especially difficult in games because of the lack of direct control on the player’s experience.
Valve have become quite skilled in the ‘guided eye’ technique to establish their design beyond just the visual uniformity and quality. In a game it doesn’t just have to have good composition from 20 perspective points but it also has to fit into the interactivity of the world. As an artist would use a gradually narrowing line to guide a viewer’s eye, a game designer might need a scurrying mouse, or that lone soldier’s shots before the airship comes smashing through.
Great design is full of subtly. The sort of thing you can’t put on the back of the box as a selling point. I’d wish there was more examples of it, but my backlog is too stocked now anyway.
Oh, no doubt – creating a cohesive visual theme that manifests itself throughout a game is a bitch. That’s why a company like Blizzard employees about a hundred REALLY good artists who all basically work to emulate the style of a handful of lead visual directors.
The thing with Layton is, though, that there’s way less gameplay getting in the way of design — the world doesn’t move. It’s a series of flat pictures, barring a couple of hand-animated movie files that play at certain times.
Obviously, for a fully 3D-rendered game world, the art requirements for producing a cohesive vision of that type are unreachable for all but the most well-funded companies. I just don’t see why an indie company couldn’t produce a more basic game, like Professor Layton, that paid as much attention to story and design direction as it does to the actual gameplay mechanics.
Just want to give a small “yay” to the return of C Debris…I visit this place once a month for past 2 years to find about 3 updates. I don’t come for about 4 months to find all this! :p