I'm trying to nail down my design philosophy here. For me, I generally quit games never to return if they're boring or too hard. Especially if they're both. I suppose it depends on what the player wants. For me, I want decent fiction that I feel I'm having an input towards how it progresses. So minimalist descriptions with lots of objects to use in lots of other sparse locations sends me to sleep. I'd rather IF more represented a short story with obvious answers over the former; although the middle ground is preferable.

Let's hear your game design dos and don'ts.

this thread has some good thoughts on this stuff:

viewtopic.php?f=20&t=3877

enjoy

This thread caused so many thoughts, I didn't know where to begin. I'll try not to go too crazy...

I think people want to play a game that is "good" - whatever that is, and it varies depending on the person. Some people like hard puzzles where you probably end up having to look at hints; other people don't like puzzles at all, or don't mind straightforward ones. I've read quite a bit on the intfiction forum, and the answer is... it depends. You'll never please everyone.

So I'd say: write the game that you'd want to play or for an audience you'd like to target (for example, for me, it's my non-IF-playing family), and then be sure to give it to people to test, as we're all too biased to judge our own games objectively (either good *or* bad. I'm often harder on my stuff than others are).

As for my preferences: I'm not a big puzzle person. I'm not good at writing them, and I don't particularly care to work them out, especially if it involves some sort of "guess the verb", "guess the noun" or "try to divine the bizarre thing the author intended." More specifically, I like a game with some sort of hook. In particular, I like games where you can do things and go places (which is why CYOA is so hard for me to get into), but more than that, I like a game that makes me feel something, preferably not frustration. But it doesn't have to have those as long as it has *something*, where that something could be anything, which I'd know when I saw it but I can't say definitively. Not helpful perhaps; mostly I'm trying to say there are no hard and fast rules. Just make it good.

I must confess that I haven't played much IF, at least not pure text adventures. I have dabbled a bit, but I'm not extremely well versed. Hopefully, that will change over time. I have played some, and I have played some graphical adventures, and I have played RPGs. (I've also played lots of other kinds of games I don't need to get into.) The games I have enjoyed the most (non-IF) have been games like Zelda and Myst Uru Online. They both have "places to go and things to do". The latter in particular has inspired me, as the game definitely has puzzles, but it's all driven by mouse clicks. The puzzles revolve more around what you do with the world, not in how you instruct the game. There is no typing, and yet I never missed it, as things just did what I expected or at least did something when I didn't know what would happen. I'd love to be able to do that with IF, where I can have puzzles and other challenges in my games that are more about what to do in the world as opposed to figuring out how to input it. (I've never been a fan of "parser as puzzle", where you as the player know what to do but part of what you have to work out - by deliberate design - is the magic words to type.)

I'm looking forward to seeing what you put together (perfect or not)!

Thanks for that in depth response. It chimes with how I want to build a game.

I played IF back in the '80s: Hampstead, Denis through the Drinking Glass, Terrormolinos etc on the 48k Spectrum. I've just researched them again there on http://www.worldofspectrum.org/ and I'm amazed that they retailed for £5+ back then (Umm, thirty odd years ago) where as superior works are available now by 'hobbyists' (?) for free.

Game design - not just in IF - in the '80s was always about punishment. Take Jet Set Willy. You forever lose lives trying to work out how to complete the game. So you get the infinite life cheat only to discover that the character begins its turn on where it entered the screen so when you accidentally fall from one screen to another and die, the game proceeds to do this infinitely. So no help there either.

But that's what we had and we went with it. For graphic based games there was a reason behind it: available memory. Games had to be punishing otherwise there was no point in releasing a game that was satisfyingly easy but over in ten minutes. I'm not sure how IF fits into that given the smaller file sizes (although some did contain crudely drawn images) but that was certainly the culture of that time.

Fast forward to today and you can now purchase fully animated RPG blockbusters that cost hundreds of thousands of pounds to make (and millions in some cases) where available memory isn't an issue any more and the design has adapted accordingly from dying very easily to the things you describe: being able to explore. In the odd occasions that people do die in modern games, they generally start back from pretty much the same position again (not from the beginning like in the '80s) with a minor infraction such as loss of weapons/inventory (Grand Theft Auto - or do you lose money, I forget now) or a percentage of accrued monies (Borderlands). Some just transport you back to the last save point or any previous one if the last one isn't convenient (Skyrim). You certainly don't get bogged down with impossible puzzles.

IF needs to catch up in this regard*. Being killed regularly in a game in the '80s is explainable. Being killed by a game in the '00s seldom happens; design shifted from punishment to minor infractions that don't really take anything away from the immersion. Difficulty can be selected.

By not following the new trends, especially from the position of the underdog, IF is commiting genre suicide, imvho.

*I know not all IF does this, but some authors still adopt these old gaming clichés like we're still in the '80s to the detriment of the audience. Sudden inexplicable deaths (or even pointless explainable ones) and impossible puzzles aren't clever, they're bad game design imo.

E2A: I find it interesting that you haven't played much IF (I haven't either, really) yet invest so much time into posting here and writing code. I guess you fall into the category of finding enjoyment through creating something rather than being the consumer (I fall into this too, tbh).

The problem in the playing category for me is first and foremost a lack of time. From what I have read, there is a lot of IF out there, and it's the needle in the haystack problem - only some of it is good. Fortunately, the good stuff has been identified, but even then (as you say), the creation side takes precedent for me, and there's little time in the cracks for playing.

I'm also going off in my own direction to some extent, trying to find a way express the stories I want in a way that I'd want to play. When the parser works, it's great. When it doesn't, it's death. I gave my wife an early incarnation of my current game that had a command line, and having no experience with IF, she just struggled, getting nowhere. I don't want anyone to have that experience. If that means I'm diverging from what has traditionally been called "IF", then so be it. Fortunately, there seems to be lots of room for experimentation, and I love trying things out. lol

I sometimes wonder about whether I'm more enamored with "interactive fiction" than I am with "text adventures", and I figure that's probably true. I hope that what I'm doing can be considered part of the former. If not, well, I hope people enjoy it anyway!

As a player, I've never been much of a fan of difficult games because I'm pretty bad at them and getting bogged down right at the start and unable to progress any further is never much fun. If I've only been playing for a few minutes and I'm stuck and typing in HELP, I'm probably not going to carry on, unless what I've seen in those few minutes has blown me away to such a degree that I just absolutely have to continue. Which doesn’t happen very often.

Saying that, I used to be a big fan of difficult games (back in the 80’s when I first started playing text adventures). I’d sit for hours trying to figure out puzzles that these days I’d just give up on. But back then I had a lot more free time on my hands and there was the added fact that if I was playing a game, I’d likely spent money on it and if I’d spent money on it, I wouldn’t quit on the thing no matter how hard it was. I wanted my money’s worth! Now, with every text adventure I play being free, there's far less incentive to keep struggling with it if I get stuck – quitting costs me nothing. (It’s also worth noting that in the internet age, any time I get stuck in a game, I can quickly hop on Google and find the solution to it, which cuts down a lot of my incentive to keep trying. Before I had access to the internet, if I wanted to finish a game, I had to do it on my own.)

As a writer, my opinions on how easy / difficult games should be have changed a lot over the years. I used to think it didn’t matter how difficult you made a game because people would finish it sooner or later, but now I think it’s better to err on the easy side. I doubt many people quit text adventures because they're too easy, but I imagine lots quit because they're too hard (I know I do). At least if a game is easy, you're likely to continue playing to see what happens next, or if it becomes more difficult later on, but if it’s too difficult to begin with you're likely to simply quit. Given the choice between people quitting my games two minutes into the because I hit them with a really hard puzzle, or them playing through to the end because I went easy on them, I know which one I’d sooner have.

I like puzzles in games because they help with pacing and also add depth to the plot to what are essentially short stories. But they shouldn't be a block on the enjoyment. I think puzzles that people may find hard should become obvious once completed. Not mixing a load of unconnected objects together to make some weird thing. If people are "wtf" at the end of the puzzle rather than "oh yeah - derr" then it's bad game design.

you can always do this too:

simply have the harder~hard parts or puzzles be optional parts of the game, which can be completely skipped, and still be able to complete the game, that way you make both types of people happy, hehe

That stirs a thought, something I read in the intfiction.org forum: you tend to want your hard puzzle near the middle of the game - and preferably only one.

You definitely don't want it hard up front, or people will be hit with it before they're vested enough to want to get through it, andf you'll lose them. You don't want it near the end either, as that initial energy and excitement about playing a game may be waning at that point, and it's easy to lose them there, too. So a gradual tapering off from the middle to the end is recommended, without it being too obvious. (This flies in the face of RPG type games like Zelda, where you fight the big bad at the end, but that's different in my eye - there, you build yourself up throughout the story to be strong enough for the big bad at the end. It's a natural progression and development, and the final fight isn't a "puzzle" anyway.)

(Note that these are not my ideas, except for the Zelda one, so I can't take credit for them, although they do make sense to me. I'm just a conduit...)

I've just recently played through most of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (N64), and the dungeon grind after dungeon grind (which includes or are puzzles in trying to figure out how to complete them), got extremely tedious and I got sick of it: I stopped at the desert dungeon, I think the last one before ganon's, the final, dungeon.

Though, with Zelda: A Link to the Past (SNES), the game was easiest enough, that the dungeons weren't grinding or tiresome. But, the game was a bit too easy, though it was so fun, that you don't mind it being a bit too easy.

Also, Zelda: The Legend of Zelda (NES), dungeons and world map, were fun, they were never tedious nor tiresome, nor too hard (well as a kid, ganon's dungeon was hard, lol, but that is acceptable, as it was the final challenge~puzzle~dungeon in the game, hehe).

So, this is something else you have to be careful of: not doing too much (grueling) puzzles, don't make your players get weary and sick with 'puzzle-idus'.

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off-topic:

I actually like Zelda: The Adventures of Link (NES) the best though

@Jay:

have you played the fan-made re-make~done of Zelda 1 (NES): Zelda C, the 'c' is for challenge, ???
(you can google search it, though be careful not to ruin it by seeing how to complete things in it, as it's got some really good dungeon puzzles and hidden locations on the world map)

Nintendo always fail to appeal to me. Apart from Mario Kart. That's the best group game ever.

One of the two games I'm attempting to write (the weightier, perhaps unfinishable project) I want to combine parser adventure with CYOA.

It kills two birds with one stone: that of parser adventures feeling too linear as opposed to CYOA, and puzzles killing the immersion and driving the audience away.

My idea is to have multiple simultaneous puzzles on the go. When one is solved it opens up a direction / creates an event that the protagonist can choose to follow. It feels a natural way of a direction being selected too. And the game has replay value.

Unfortunately, I can only envisage it working in the sense of once a path is chosen the other paths should then be blocked (as with CYOA). But this could create an issue with the player feeling they were forced out of an area with things left unresolved. The player will also now be carrying objects irrelevant to the rest of the game. How to dump them in a manner convincing to the narrative?

I'm sure it's been done before and I'm not inventing the wheel here. Anyone got any experience of games written in this way?

I'd be happy to offer some thoughts, but I'm still not sure how you're planning it to work. What is your planned user interface? How do you envision incorporating CYOA features in your parser?

(It sounds intriguing!)

jaynabonne wrote:I'd be happy to offer some thoughts, but I'm still not sure how you're planning it to work. What is your planned user interface? How do you envision incorporating CYOA features in your parser?

(It sounds intriguing!)

My last post obviously made no sense.

For example, the opening of my game is outside of the building. There's three ways into the building. The only way to enter the building is through a puzzle hence there's three available puzzles. Depending on the player, they will solve one of the puzzles which will create the entry into the building and a unique story. Once inside the building there'll be other things to solve to progress. Again there'll be a couple of avenues that again will open the story up in different ways.

OK, I'm seeing more clearly...

As far as how to deal with objects that are no longer needed, I had one thought, which might not work in all cases. The idea is that items needed for puzzles are basically "consumed" by the puzzle. For something like a key in a lock, it's easy - after you use the key, it's in the lock and no longer in your inventory. I'm not sure if that could be applied in all cases, but it might be an approach.

jaynabonne wrote:OK, I'm seeing more clearly...

As far as how to deal with objects that are no longer needed, I had one thought, which might not work in all cases. The idea is that items needed for puzzles are basically "consumed" by the puzzle. For something like a key in a lock, it's easy - after you use the key, it's in the lock and no longer in your inventory. I'm not sure if that could be applied in all cases, but it might be an approach.

The problem is that as there's three puzzles open (perhaps unbeknown to the player) they'll still be carrying objects from the two puzzles they didn't solve when the game progresses.

The only answer I've thought of is to run a script liberating the player of these objects with some kind of text saying "You empty your pockets into the bin." But I just know hard nosed IF players aren't going to buy that cop-out.

I suppose I could engineer something where objects can't be carried to continue (like weight on a bridge) but I can't keep repeating that infinitely in a game!

I see what you mean. Hmm... well I'll think some more.

Sort of similar to what you were saying: I used to play a game called Runescape. There was a special arena you could enter, but you couldn't take anything with you. If you tried, it prevented you. You could just drop your items on the ground, but they had a special "night deposit" slot where you could put your items, and they'd end up back in your bank account/storage. (That's more than you need, as you won't need them again.) But there is precedent.

I don't know what the overall theme is for your game. Perhaps the different rooms are different worlds, and the items simply disappear when you change rooms (like taking things off the holodeck in Star Trek). Perhaps the doorways are too narrow for you to fit with items in your pockets, or you need your hands free to bridge the gap, so the player needs to drop them... Or you could just silently remove them. You land naked and carrying nothing, like a Terminator! lol

I played Runescape (ummm circa 2006/7?) briefly too.

Actually, the solution perhaps isn't based around the problem you solved, but what objects you're still carrying. That is natural. Would be a headache to script though. Maybe.

Speaking of puzzles being too hard in a game, if I can not figure out how to do something in the first few minutes or half hour of starting the game where I can not proceed any further and I am pretty sure I know the solution to the puzzle, but I am fighting the interface and have even typed "help", "about" or "info", with nothing useful to show for it, I see no need to continue. And the same can be said for a game I might have spent an hour or two on, maybe even came back to later and have several rooms to look at, but no matter what I try I am stuck.

I am more into meaningful exploration more than anything else. I want to visit your world to learn of it's people and of it's events, not be trapped behind a door I can never get unlocked. All that time and effort you put into your world for others to enjoy, your vision was a waste, because of some nifty command you wanted us to use and we never found out. Now maybe someone else likes that type of game, but not I. As someone else said, you can not please everyone.

But with that being said, although I have heard two different variations to the same theme, Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Twilight Princess had some pretty decent progression of dungeon puzzles. But what set those games apart from others was of course it's story and also it's unique combat system that others have tried to copy since and even many years later and many different consoles since, with super duper graphics and processors, are still lacking... playability and the want to finish the game.

And I have found the Water Temple for both games to be the hardest of the bunch, but also about in the middle or the possibly a little after it. That does not mean the rest of the dungeons afterward were a push over, but they did not seem, at least to me, to have the same complexity. And each dungeon revolved around a certain tactic or new piece of equipment you found. It was never meant to be overly frustrating. And yet they always added “extras” to push those who wanted them like the pieces of the heart container to make your life 100%, etc. And although you may be stuck, you were never truly stuck because you always had help from your partner like Navi the fairy or Midna the imp and when you passed a puzzle you felt you truly accomplished something.

And that new found power, equipment or technique you found in the beginning becomes second nature. Not because you had to train the skill or learn a silly command, but simply because through exploring and combat you learned it naturally as it were. And again, it isn't just puzzles for the sake of a puzzle, it was part of the story and it is what drove you on to the finish. No one I know wants to just sit there and do one boring puzzle after another. I mean I know there are people out there like that, I just do not know of any. So basically LoZ is one big puzzle game with many puzzles linking it to the finish and with some simpler ones you did not even know was a puzzle, just progression of the story, like catching all the chickens to collect a piece of a heart. Or bringing the unhatched egg to the sleeping man to wake him up. And that is what made the game accessible to the hardcore to the casual gamer. The game was just fun with something for every one.

So to come full circle, if you want to make the puzzles fun, do not have the player do the exact same thing every time they come to another locked door. Resident Evil had and may still have a habit of, “here is a locked door, let's find the correct key. Let's call this a puzzle and have them run back with a very small inventory with dangerous creatures.” Rinse and repeat, “oh look, let's make it a key card this time. Oh lets have a broken emblem of two pieces, put them together and the door opens...” wow...

Did it make the game any less terrifying? Not really, maybe more so because you are forced with an already limited inventory to now not be able to carry an extra weapon or healing herb because you have to carry the keys. Any less fun? Possibly, because it made no sense, (They were trained special tactical units... shoot the freaking lock!?) and if you see the game and those parts for what they really were, very small areas in a sense that you were made it think the game was big because you had to keep running back and forth with the stupid keys. (Any one remember the original Halo, no puzzles as it were, but it seemed you went from point A – Z and then came right back the same way you came...) What would take me six hours, because I like to explore and check everything, can be done in half the time or less by an experienced person. Have the ability to have no locked doors and no key runs and you could probably traverse the entire game in less than an hour.

So if you are looking for a fun puzzler, that obviously was not it. But who says a text adventure has to have puzzles to begin with... or at least the kind that makes you even think you are doing a puzzle... just saying...