Any recommendations for software to create an "interactive game" DVD? - by DarkForge
DarkForge on 15/10/2010 at 15:54
Well I rarely start threads on this board, but since many people here seem to know many things, I figure it's worth a shot.
For the past couple of weeks or so I've been busy beavering on a few self-made DVD projects and, although I'm not at this point just yet, there is one snag that I'm eventually going to come across...
I'm looking to make a DVD interactive game, one that will play in your standard DVD player. You know the type: the game is usually a pretty simple affair, it can ask you a question and you're able to choose options/select an answer within the video file itself (or at least a menu with moving video in it). Some electronic wizardy somewhere is able to keep a tally of your scores, and depending on how many answers you got right or wrong, it may give you a different ending. (Also, in my particular case, the video files display answers for so long, waiting for you to pick one, then switch to a part where it gives a clue, before returning to the selection screen again.)
I have all the video clips I want to use, it's just a case of being able to put it all together. I love the program I use to make my normal DVDs (TMPGEnc DVD Author 3) as it does the job nicely and is really easy to use, but sadly it doesn't cater for more "unique" projects like this. I've been looking into a few ways to try it with my current program, but I just don't think it's going to be able to sufficiently pull it off. Many menu pages would be needed, but DVDs made with DVD Author always return to the very first menu page when they finish playing a file - they never goes back to the menu page they were last on.
So I realise it may be a long shot, but is anybody aware of any software that would be able to accurately re-create the structure of one of these styles of DVD game? I figure there must be specialist programs like that out there, although whether they're publically available may be another issue. My own searching efforts have turned up nothing thus far (although of course I'm still looking.)
Any suggestions/advice greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance. :)
henke on 15/10/2010 at 16:31
Adobe Encore should do it, with Photoshop for making the menus. It does let you determine what menu/video it jumps to after a video has come to it's end so I guess it should suffice. There might be better DVD authoring apps out there tho, I don't know, Encore is the only one I've used and frankly it feels a bit bloated and sluggish and not terribly powerful.
Queue on 15/10/2010 at 17:11
I'm curious about the game you have in mind?
(This sounds like a fun thing to do!)
Muzman on 15/10/2010 at 22:59
I've only really done this on the Mac, but DVD Studio Pro should probably get you most of the way there. It has, for instance, 3d menu tree views where you can connect up media and menus in any which way for complex projects. Whatever you use on PC would want that sort of thing.
I'm not too sure about the ability to keep score though. Once we had to make something with different branching conditions, but didn't really have time to dig into it properly and just basically used brute force in the end. Glancing around the interactive DVD games just now we probably should have grabbed one of them to see how they did it. The complexity and the time didn't really warrant any quality back end effort though. There would be a lot of custom coding I'd suspect and there was facilities for that, but nothing in a 'Dreamweaver for DVD' sort of way that I saw. But it was a while ago. The pros all used Sonic Scenarist from what I gather.
Yakoob on 16/10/2010 at 00:22
Aye, was gonna suggest Adobe Encore as well.
Muzman on 16/10/2010 at 16:38
Some further digging and I can't find anything that says Encore, even up to CS5, supports scripting of the sort necessary for a game.
It may do, but I can't find anything concrete that says it does. I wouldn't be surprised that it doesn't though. Previous versions didn't and DVD being somewhat dead now, I can well imagine they didn't bother adding it this time around. (everyone has moved on to Bluray now o'course which has bountiful scripting options, it basically running java, can do alpha channels and all manner of crap you can dream of).
What you want is (
http://www.geniusdv.com/news_and_tutorials/2008/08/scripting_in_dvd_studio_part_3_random_play.php) these sorts of options. (
http://forums.creativecow.net/thread/145/860429#860463) These guys also recommend something called DVDLab.
There will certainly be ways to do it by hand too, if all this software is getting too much and you're game (so to speak).
DarkForge on 16/10/2010 at 19:40
Thank you everybody for taking the time to reply! I figured there might be some program out there more suited for the job, and it looks as though I've got a few suggestions here that are worth looking into further.
henke: I've already briefly read up on Adobe Encore after you mentioned it and it does grab my interest a little. The only thing that concerns me though is its mention of using Photoshop for menu creation. All my menus are actually filmed videos and therefore have moving elements, so at the very least I would require motion menus - something that would allow video clips to be used as a menu background, preferably with the video's original sound. (Again this is something that DVD Author 3 allows, and I'm guessing that's one of the more "basic & user-friendly" programs out there if
I'm using it! :D ). So if Encore can't cater for that then I'm afraid it would have to be ruled out.
Queue (and anyone else interested): the game I'm working on is a pretty basic one aimed at young kids (my goal in life is to become a teacher, FYI). Essentially it's a simple Q&A-style affair that would have 3 "rounds" of questions, each for a different subject. Multiple choice answers, and once one subject is complete you can then go back to choose another. Ideally you could tackle the subjects in any order you wished, but only once all three are completed would the game let you know your overall success.
For reference, here's a very crude flow chart I threw together to outline the structure. Blue boxes are choices the player makes, green arrows lead to what would come next as a result of that choice, whilst red boxes and arrows are certain "requirements" the game would check for at a particular point and determine what comes next accordingly (the whole "keeping score" thing.)
Inline Image:
http://h1.ripway.com/darkforge/dvdgame-flowfinal.JPG( (
http://h1.ripway.com/darkforge/dvdgame-flowfinal.JPG) Or try clicking here. )
P.S: Regarding the hints, whilst I have a feeling it may be possible to have the hint automatically cut in after a certain amount of time, if it's not possible for any reason then an alternative option would be to have a separate button that the player could press to view the hint video should they choose to.
I admit I'm pretty uninformed on stuff like this, but you see interactive DVDs do this kind of stuff all the time and so I just figured "if they can do it, then it's not impossible!" :cheeky:
Again, a massive thank you for everyone's help thus far. If you have any further enlightenment, or if anybody else wishes to chime in, I'd certainly appreciate the input!
Muzman on 17/10/2010 at 03:47
Quote Posted by DarkForge
henke: I've already briefly read up on Adobe Encore after you mentioned it and it does grab my interest a little. The only thing that concerns me though is its mention of using Photoshop for menu creation. All my menus are actually filmed videos and therefore have moving elements, so at the very least I would require motion menus - something that would allow video clips to be used as a menu background, preferably with the video's original sound. (Again this is something that DVD Author 3 allows, and I'm guessing that's one of the more "basic & user-friendly" programs out there if
I'm using it! :D ). So if Encore can't cater for that then I'm afraid it would have to be ruled out.
Using video clips or loops for menu backgrounds is a pretty standard feature. Encore would support it, I'm sure.
DVD menus, burders and buttons can have various layers for their different states, a bit like roll overs on the web. These can all be transparencies of images or text, so the video or background can be seen behind it. With DVD Studio it was possible to lay out an entire menu in photoshop, with all of its transparent elements on different layers, in a single file. Then you import it where you can (sorta) easily assign any of the layers to a particular button state, piece of banner text etc, for the DVD.
I'd say this is almost certainly what they're talking about with Encore.
DarkForge on 22/10/2010 at 15:22
Well I've been doing a little more in-depth reading on the DVD Lab that Muzman linked to, and I think I'll give this one a shot. What I've seen most people say about the learning curve sort of gives me a headache just reading about it :cheeky: but then again I never expected that this would easy to pull off.
I'll keep Encore in mind as a back-up (from what I can tell DVD Studio Pro is only available on the Mac, unless I've overlooked something), but from what I've seen thus far DVD Lab could be the best bet.
Thank you again Muzman (and also for clearing up the Encore motion menu thing - makes a bit more sense now!) and everybody else for their input. If you guys are ever in my neck of the woods, the milk and cookies are on me!
Right then, here I go!
Wish me luck... :erg:
