hah, nice! Briar Rose is supposed to be decent, i haven't played it yet.
Yeah, every game is TONS of art. i'll tell you how we build those scenes, and other companies are different because some use Torque, Playground, etc, and we use Director. Director has a plugin called Photocaster that allows you take a .psd file and import the whole thing with each layer becoming a new cast member.
So to build a scene on the art side, we have a producer who just kinda says "i want a scene on a yacht", maybe with some reference images from google. then our sketch artist draws it up, and it gets sent to contractors who do 3D stuff in Prague, they do the scene in 3D, even though we're only doing 2D, because they can screenshot the scene itself, and then move the camera for stuff like zoomins. They send us back a .psd that only has a few layers, the main background and some major stuff that gets moved around. open doors, windows, sliding bookcases, whatever. Then our artists take that and add ALL the extraneous crap that goes into a scene. objects you need to find, puzzle elements, whatever. When that's done, they give me a .psd file, and i import into Director. Then i have X number of sprites that i can drag onto the screen and manipulate with code however i want within that scene. we attach behaviours to sprites, that is the bulk of the "coding" that goes on, writing those behaviours. everyone does it differently, even the 4 of us coding here all do it quite different. There are SO many ways to layout the game and code it within director.
So that happens for, on average, 30 scenes or so, in each game. usually you average 1-2 zoomins per scene as well, and they are basically a mini-scene. either hidden object list based crap that is easy as hell, or mini-games that tend to take up the bulk of coding time.
HOWEVER, Director is about to run it's course here, because making games at 1024x768 is about our max due to speed limitations in Director. Full screen animations are out of the question, even at 800x600. We're looking at some other engines, like Torque, but i'm not too involved in that part.
Check out our game, Escape The Lost Kingdom, comes out next week. (hopefully!) It's the first "3D" casual game, and I believe the first PC game to be released with the red/blue glasses for 3D effects. It's gonna be a rock star! I did the zoomins and mini-games for it when i first started here.
I realize at this point i didn't address most of what you thought we need.... :P
Screen tracker/map layout of screen connections
- naw, my game doesn't even have a map, depends on the game. I just jump from one scene to another using like 'go to "Scene6"' (seriously, goto! it's in Director, but it's the only way to jump around from scene to scene, you'd have to know director...)
screen display:
background picture
-perhaps multiple layers
In Director, the "score" is where you layout sprites, so sprite(1) is the furthest back, in z-position terms. sprite(1000) is the max. the 1000 sprite limit per-scene is another Director headache that is getting old!
(cheap) particle system
we have one of those now, one of the guys built it in Director
Clickable areas of arbitrary shape
We take a single pixel image, and resize it on the screen in Director to whatever size/shape we want. if it needs to be anything other than a rotated/skewed rectangle, we'd have to use a full-size image for it.
Animation capable sprites/video
yeah. Director is pretty awesome for doing quick animations! For video we just import a .flv file from the artists and tell it to play.
context sensitive mouse cursor
sprite(1000) on every game is the PAUSE graphic you see when the game pauses, sprite(999) is the cursor, we attach a behaviour to it that handles switching to different cursor modes, which is just switching the sprite that's attached to the cursor.
game statemachine/controller
not really, just goto! :P
menu system
the menu and HUD is always complicated because it's different for every game, and laying them out in Director is tedious. It's also where most of the bugs will slip through, because no one looks at the options screen more than once in the course of game's development!
hooooly shit this is long! if i don't get some MiPS, i will be pissed!