Comments on 304: The Number of the Ben: Icing on the Cake

Twinmoon: I get where you are coming from, and tha...

2008-10-13T03:50:00.000-07:00

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 :)

In my opinion, it's good practice to try and make ...

2008-10-11T19:50:00.000-07:00

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.

I don't have your problem at all:What I want to do...

2008-10-11T18:56:00.000-07:00

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.)