Valdred's guide to the Genres

[deValdr]

- The project guide -
By Valdred

Selecting a Genre
All games, movies, literature, theater and music is divided into groups, or genres.
In this tutorial, I will help you decide what genre your game fits in
and what kinds of resources and scripts you should use.


Adventure
The Adventure-genre (also called the Fantasy-genre) is probably the most common genre of rpg maker games.
Games in the Adventure genre takes place in a medieval themed world of magic and monsters.
The hero is usually a young boy starting out as a poor and weak person, but ending up as a great hero.
A girl is also often involved as the main characters big love.
The adventure-genre is based on fairytales, but are less predictable and has more twisted story lines.
Examples of adventure-stories & games are Lord of the rings, World of warcraft, runescape, the elder scrolls and Narnia.

Tilesets:
The rtp,
World map,
Exterior,
Interior
lots of tilesets

Sandbox-rpg's
A sandbox rpg is simply an rpg where the story is less important or not there at all. Sandbox rpg's allows the player to walk around freely in the game world to explore and have fun. They can take place anywhere and anytime, but is usually set to the Adventure setting. The 'first' sandbox-game was a game from 1984 called elite and later there have been lots of them. Newer sandbox games are usually influenced by the fantasy genre as I said above. Examples of sandbox games are: The elder scrolls, Grand theft auto (GTA),
Tilesets:
The rtp,
World map,
Exterior,
Interior

Horror survival
In horror survivals, the race of men have either died, disappeared or turned into zombies. You play the last living person and your objective is to survive all alone and defeat the zombies.
Horror survivals are not easy to make, they require a pretty solid storyline, lots of music, some scary tilesets, scary charsets + more.
Some examples of horror survivals are:
- One night
- I am legend


Psychological horror
The less action-oriented sibling of horror survival. Psychological horror games tries to scare you without using scary pictures or persons by telling you that something is near you without telling what.

Imagine going into an old abandoned house in the middle of the night. The power is of so you gotta find a switch in the basement. You head down into the dark underground floor and decides to get this over with quickly. You find the old switch and turns it on, dim light fills the above floors. You head up to the top floor to go to sleep. You make the bed and undresses and grabs a book from the book shelve. Suddenly the light goes off. Somebody turned of the light again in the basement.

This is a typical psychological horror situation. You now know that something is in the basement, you don't know what or why it turned of the light. In a good psychological horror there would also be something that prevented you from leaving this house.
Darkness+ Claustrophobia + knowledge - most of the knowledge = A good psychological horror game.
Examples of Psychological horror games & movies is:
- Forlorn manor (can be found on rmrk)
lots of tilesets

Futuristic
Futuristic games takes place in a future world of laser guns and space-ships. Most of them takes place in a world where all or most of the planets in the universe is populated by different races. Some are good and some are evil.
lots of tilesets


Mystery
Mystery games are often set to modern time, sometimes real world, sometimes different world. These games hook the player by making him wonder what's the truth is, how what happened happened and why. Therefore you need a good idea to create such a game, or else the player will be disappointed when he figures out the answer is less interesting than the question. Examples of such games are:
- Anima

I'll update this thread and put some more examples and genres later.

[jubhub731]

Nice i like it but you missed a couple of genres (not that i care) . Plus now i know what kind of genre my game is :cheery:

[deValdr]

I know I missed a few. I'll add them after the winter-holiday week.
Please post the ones that I missed in case i forgot some.

[Lunarea]

You really should re-evaluate your genres and separate genre from setting or plot device. "Futuristic" is a setting and as such, it can be in any genre. You can have a futuristic adventure game, futuristic shooter, futuristic strategy game and so on. A mystery is a plot device and you can see it in an adventure game, but also in a first-person-shooter, puzzle game, time management and so on.

I think you also need to do a lot more research on the different genres. You're using cliche plot elements for descriptions instead of actually naming different genre conventions. This wiki entry is a good starting point, but also look at how commercial games are organized in video game stores, how they are described in reviews and so on. Some genres will have sub-genres, such as hidden object game as a sub-genre to first person adventure or a tactics sub-genre in a role playing game.

[Jacket]

Haha wow that's bad. And i bet you'd say harry potter and adventure in camelot are the same story because HOLY MOLY WANDS!!! Life of Brian is a religious story! Crucifixes and all. It's the same genre as the greatest story ever told, or even little drummer boy. Adventure games can be ANY of the narrative genres (actual adventure, horror, sci fi, detective, or any mix of). Don't confuse situations with genre.

Adventure genres are mystery games (IE: detective), games that have fantasy such as Dragons Lair, and practically ALL forms of interactive fiction falls under the adventure genre. Despite many of them involve goblins and dragons, while many include those crappy flash dating sims and social simulators. Dating sims. Those are adventure games, as much as it hurts me to say that my favorite game genre is involved with such crap, they are. Adventure games are built around puzzles and interactions. Play some. You might understand them then.

Also what is futuristic? That's assanine. Really. Did you confuse situationals and settings as narrative and mechanic? Look, go read up on some things instead of just seeing what the lead character has on hand before writing up a tutorial on things as simple as this. I could tear into any, and all of the genres you put down, but quite frankly after just reading what you wrote up on Adventure, and ranting on it for way too long than it deserved, I'm now quite rattled with a head ache.

I've never seen someone describe a genre completely wrongly and give examples that are totally wrong. Also how pretentious to say what tiles must be used. Let alone do it repeatedly. Seriously. Do we know what the term "genre" means?