I managed to get Riven the 1997 Point and Click adventure game working today. It only works with Quicktime 2 so you have to mess about a bit getting it to work on XP.
Rather than waste the whole day playing, I did a little bit of reading on Riven and Myst (perhaps its more famous predecessor). Seems like recently the code has been open sourced. Makes sense because the nature of the game’s simple (but stunning) interface lends itself to online playing – you could almost program the game in Powerpoint, you move between a series of photographs the interactive pieces eg. levers and doors are very simple animations.
In 1997 on a 800×600 screen the photograph quality images and beautiful soundscapes were quite a thing.
Doing a Powerpoint version of the school was a project that I dreamed up a couple of years ago for the kids at school. Now we have the gifted and talented kids turning up on Thursday night, I might have to dust that plan off.
That and keeping my eye on development of independent Riven games based on the opens source code.
See 30 Second TV advert for Riven. This animation is actually an unusual part of the game like a video reward for when you beat a level and go up to the next one. The game play is more sedate.
I wanted to clarify for you:
The game that is going to be open sourced is “Myst Online”, which is a real-time 3D rendered world, rather than the powerpoint/hypercard style of the original Myst and Riven games. Myst Online was originally marketed as “Uru Live” in 2003; a quick search on YouTube for either Myst Online or Uru Live will turn up many videos created by fans of the game, and those should give you a better idea of the game’s interface.
Thanks for pointing that out John. I did check out some of the videos as you suggested and I can see that Uru Live IS a polygon moving engine. I obviously got the wrong idea.
Update: Inspired by people posting snow pictures in the UK I tested a little Riven type point and click adventure down my street – not using Powerpoint but html (Dreamweaver actually) – just to give me an idea of how the kids might do it.
http://www.openk.net/images/rr_frontdoor.htm
Then I tried an alternative method on Flickr
http://www.flickr.com/photos/richardradio/3247536240/
look for the hotspot hyperlinks