When I'm in full creative mode, I generally work on a game pretty late into the night, and then retire to bed with thoughts about the game still scurrying about in my skull.
Shoot, I Got Abducted! saw me retire one night and, laying in bed following these thoughts through my head I focused on the puzzles I'd written for the game. I thought about one I'd just programmed up before going to bed, which was a keypad pressing puzzle. The code for the puzzle was written on a piece of paper that players obtained from a small compartment. I was thinking about the puzzle, and a little worried that it might be too simple, when I thought "Hey, why don't I cut the piece of paper in half, leaving only half the code behind? That'll add a little bit of depth to the puzzle."
Needless to say, I jumped out of bed and made the changes immediately. As soon as I did it, I felt a complete fool for not doing it earlier. I had, for a while, missed the potential to take a puzzle to the next level. Going back and replaying the game, it's basically the only puzzle that I feel good about in the game. Putting that tiny little touch on the puzzle was like putting the icing on the cake - it's only a small touch, but it adds quite a bit.
I feel that with both my own games, and other people's games, sometimes the puzzles are just there because adventure games (sorry, Graphical Interactive Fiction pieces ;) ) need puzzles, right? Otherwise, what would you do?
I want to work on making puzzles more interesting, more unique than just "Collect all this funky stuff and then move on to the next place full of funky stuff, using it all on things as you go." Every now and then a puzzle will pop up in a game and I'll go "Man, that's a good puzzle, I want to build them like that."
Until then, puzzle design will remain one of the reasons why I want to branch out into working with other genres - simply because I have such a hard time finding a puzzle that I'm truly satisfied with. If there's a good method of approaching puzzle design, I'm yet to find it.
3 comments:
I don't have your problem at all:
What I want to do with Graphical Interactive Fiction ;-) is tell a story.
So after I write the plot, I imagine problems that could arise from going to one point in my story to the other, and make that into a puzzle.
Say, my story is "man takes bus to store to buy coffee."
A quick brainstorm:
* you don't have money for the bus > find your wallet
* you need excact change > go to friendly neighbour who can break your ten-dollar-bill into small change
* store's out of coffee > nag unwilling shop assistant until he gets some out of the storage.
IMHO these puzzles seem to fit into the story. It's a pretty stupid example, but you get the idea.
(You can easily make them more complex: your wallet only contains an ATM card, so go find an ATM machine, you get robbed when getting the money, so go after the robbers, etc.)
In my opinion, it's good practice to try and make the puzzles appropriately scaled to the issue at hand.
Say for example you have a locked door, and you made it the entire goal of the game to get past this locked door. You have to collect all sorts of inventory items, talk to all sorts of characters, and combine all sorts of items to finally acquire the one "key" to unlock it and beat the game.
Think about the puzzle in terms of its context in various 'tiers':
-Am I unlocking an ordinary door, or the most guarded and high security door in the world? Does it make sense for me to complete 10-20 tasks to simply open this door?
-Would the game benefit from lowering those tasks on the door?
-Would the game benefit from actually leaving the door unlocked, and letting the player concentrate on puzzles for a more complicated objective, such as invading the evil villian's hideout, climbing up the elevator shaft, and then disguising yourself as one of the guards and entering his main chamber?
Puzzle-design is a hard thing to grasp. It's easy to think you know what you're doing, but hard to understand the mechanics behind it, and how the player will react to the puzzle.
Twinmoon: I get where you are coming from, and thank you for the comment.
Sadly, when I make a game, it is because I love making games. Absolutely love it. Storytelling is one of my weaker areas, I am sure, but focusing on graphics and animation has meant that I've had less time to learn story telling, game design and scripting. It's an interesting challenge, working either with oneself or a team mate to see how you can make the most of your combined skills.
TheJBurger: A good list, and while I've never thought about it this way, I completely agree. Sometimes I've been guilty of including puzzles just for the sake of expanding playtime - because a game needs gameplay, of course :P
Making puzzles fit into stories, and taking a look at the big picture when designing a puzzle are some things I'll definitely be having a think about in the future, so big thanks for the comments and thoughts :)
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