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#Post#: 89--------------------------------------------------
Designing the Puzzle
DIR By: Pam
Date: June 7, 2021, 1:28 pm
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Bob Bates, 1997
Game Developers Conference
Source
HTML http://web.archive.org/web/20160128131626/http://www.scottkim.com.previewc40.carrierzone.com/thinkinggames/GDC00/bates.html
In the beginning… there were puzzles. At the dawn of adventure
games, stories were practically non-existent, characters were
heard from but rarely seen, and the measure of a game lay almost
solely in the mental challenge it presented.
Those days are over.
As the genre has matured, people are more likely to
evaluate a game by the quality of its story and graphical
presentation than by the ingenuity of its puzzles. When today’s
game buyer does think about puzzles, he is more likely to ask if
they get in the way of the story. Are they so difficult they
will prevent him from finishing the game? Do they make any
sense? Are they fair? Are they fun?
But puzzles still lie at the heart of adventure gaming.
Good puzzles contribute to plot, character, and story
development. Good puzzles draw the player into the fictional
world. Good puzzles can make a game great. Bad puzzles, however,
do none of those things. They are intrusive and obstructionist.
Like bad writing, they draw attention to themselves and divert
the player’s attention from the story, destroying the magical
experience the author is trying to create.
In this paper we’ll look at the different types of puzzles,
what distinguishes good design from bad, how to adjust the level
of difficulty, and how to use puzzles to enhance your story.
#Post#: 90--------------------------------------------------
Re: Designing the Puzzle
DIR By: Pam
Date: June 7, 2021, 1:47 pm
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Types of puzzles
The art of puzzle design lies in creating an original set
of problems and solutions that are appropriate to the story you
are telling. Even so, puzzles fall into recognizable categories
and it is important to know what they are and when you can use
them. Here are some of the categories:
1. Ordinary use of an object in the way it was obviously
designed
This is the simplest puzzle of all. You enter a dark room
and discover an empty light socket. You check your inventory and
discover a light bulb. You screw in the light bulb, turn on the
switch, and now you have light. This is the most straightforward
kind of activity you can ask a player to perform.
2. Unusual use of an object
This takes advantage of secondary characteristics of
objects. It relies on players recognizing that things can be
used in other ways than their creator intended. Diamonds make
pretty rings, but they can also cut glass. A candle can light up
a dark room, but its wax can also be collected to make an
impression of a key, or it can light a fire that will set off a
smoke alarm, or the heat from its flame can be used to expose
secret writing on a piece of paper.
3. "Building" puzzles
Sometimes you need to create a new object out of raw
material that is available in the game. You can do this either
by converting one object into another, or by combining two or
more objects to create something totally new. In the first case,
if there is a crevasse to cross and a tree growing next to it,
perhaps you can give the player an ax to cut down the tree and
create a bridge.
In the second case (courtesy of designer Ken Rolston),
let’s say there is a baby crying in a cradle and you want to
calm her down. You can take a few strips of kindling, tie them
together with thread, attach a few brightly colored trinkets,
and hang the resulting mobile over her bed.
The most common danger with "building" puzzles, however, is
that a designer often assumes that players will automatically
jump to the solution the designer wants them to. Perhaps the
player thinks the baby is crying because she is hungry, or cold,
or wants to be rocked, or just held? Building a mobile is far
down on the list of things a player may think of to try to calm
a baby. What you must do is give the player the information he
needs to nudge him towards the solution. In this case, you can
have the infant’s father tell you that the baby is well rested
and fed, but that he left her favorite toy - a mobile - back
home.
4. Information puzzles
These are puzzles in which the player has to supply a
missing piece of information. It could be as simple as supplying
a password, or as complex as deducing the correct sequence of
numbers that will defuse a bomb.
5. Codes, Cryptograms, and other "word" puzzles
These are a subset of Information Puzzles that define the
boundaries of the kind of information the player is looking for.
It is important that the designer let the player know when he is
trying to solve a word puzzle, as they are generally unrelated
to the game’s mood and setting. One way to do this is to
establish the character demanding the information as someone who
relishes wordplay. In the case of cryptograms, anything more
complex than a single letter substitution should probably be
considered out of bounds.
6. Excluded middle
This is one of the hardest types of puzzles. It relies on
setting up dependable cause-and-effect relationships, and then
requiring the player to recognize that one particular action
will kick off a chain of events that will culminate in the
desired action taking place. Stated in terms of logic; "a"
always causes "b", and "c" always causes "d". So when the player
finds himself in a situation that requires "d", in a location
where he has reason to believe "b" and "c" would be linked, then
hopefully, he will perform "a".
Preparing the way. A wrinkle on the excluded middle that
makes it even more difficult is to require the player to create
the condition that would cause the final link in the chain to
occur. The longer the logical chain, and the more conditions the
player has to create, the harder the puzzle gets. Be careful of
this, however, because it can quickly become a case of asking
the player to "read the designer’s mind," (see the discussion
"What Makes a Bad Puzzle" later in this chapter).
7. People puzzles
The most satisfying puzzles are those which involve people.
This is because while trying to solve them, the player
inevitably learns more about the game’s characters, and good
characters are the backbone of good stories. These puzzles
usually involve a person who is blocking your progress or who
holds a piece of information that you need. In order to progress
in the story, you have to learn the "key" to their desires. If
it is a guard, perhaps he can be bribed. If it is a spy, perhaps
you can uncover the secret piece of information he has been
seeking. If it is a megalomaniac, perhaps you can find something
to stroke his ego. If it is a child, perhaps you can find a toy.
8. Timing puzzles
This is a difficult class of puzzle that requires the
player to recognize he must take an action that will not yield
an instant effect, but instead will cause something to happen at
a particular point in the future. This gets even harder if more
than one location is involved.
9. Sequence puzzles
These are puzzles that rely on performing a series of
actions in just the right order. Mostly they are comedic, as in
the Babble Fish puzzle in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by
Steve Meretzky. Usually, the player is presented with a simple
means of achieving a simple goal. When he performs that action,
however, something suddenly pops up to prevent it. The situation
then resets, and the player must put something in place to solve
the new problem before kicking off the sequence again. This can
get quite elaborate.
10. Logic puzzles
If Mr. Robinson is a dentist, and Mr. Smith drives a brown
car, and Mr. Jones only opens doors on Wednesdays, then you get
the idea.
11. Classic game puzzles
These aren’t true adventure game puzzles, but they seem to
find their way into many games anyway. Examples are magic square
puzzles, move-the-matchstick puzzles, or
jump-the-peg-and-leave-the-last-one-in-the-middle puzzles. The
thing to remember about them is that there should be an easy way
to "re-set" them so that the player can return quickly to the
opening position if he gets hopelessly tangled. I also believe
they are sufficiently outside the genre that the designer should
provide either a "help" system or an alternative to completing
the puzzle so that players who are not adept at them (like me)
don’t get stalled.
12. Riddles
This is one of the least satisfying kinds of puzzles,
because if the player doesn’t get it, he doesn’t get it. If
you’re going to do a riddle puzzle, be sure to include plenty of
hints in nearby locations.
13. Dialog puzzles
A by-product of dialog trees, these puzzles require the
player to maneuver a conversation down the correct path until a
character says or does the right thing. The big advantage of
dialog puzzles is that nothing brings out character like talking
to someone. The big disadvantage is that the solution is always
lying in front of the player if only he has the patience to
pursue every option of every dialog. This is tedious at best,
and promotes a feeling of player paranoia. ("Gee, I wonder if I
missed some crucial piece of information because I didn’t go
down every path of the dialog tree. Maybe I’d better restore and
go back and do that.") The best solution to this problem is to
acknowledge that you’re not really presenting a puzzle here, and
to manage things so that the player cannot exit until he has
acquired whatever crucial piece of information he needs to
proceed.
14. Trial and error puzzles
A player is confronted with an array of choices, and with
no information to go on, he must try one thing, find it doesn’t
work, and keep trying new things until suddenly one of them
clicks.
15. Machinery puzzles
These are puzzles in which the player must figure out how
to operate the controls of a machine. Sometimes it involves
trial and error, sometimes logic. In Mission Critical, by Mike
Verdu, there was a rupture in the pipes that supplied coolant
fluid to the spaceship’s nuclear reactor. The player had to
manipulate the controls of the machine that pumped the fluid
through the pipes to re-route the fluid past the rupture and
prevent a melt-down.
16. Alternate interfaces
These can be anything from machinery puzzles to maps. You
remove the normal game interface and replace it with a screen
that the player has to manipulate in order to reach a
pre-defined condition. The coolant fluid puzzle mentioned above
provided an excellent opportunity to create an alternate
interface.
17. Mazes
"You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike." Mazes
used to be a staple of adventure games. They required the player
to take a pencil and paper and map the locations, usually by
dropping inventory items in them. Over time, mazes have become
cliché. Now I recommend doing them only if there is a unique
twist to mapping or finding your way through the maze.
18. Overall "gestalt" puzzles
Sometimes a puzzle comes not from performing a specific
action but from recognizing a general condition. The best of
these that I recall is the "sundial" puzzle in Trinity, by Brian
Moriarty. At the beginning of the game, you are standing next to
a sundial in Kensington Gardens. After a sequence of
extraordinary events, you find yourself transported to a
completely bizarre world. As you explore, you find some parts of
the world shrouded in darkness. Later, those same areas are
bathed in light. After a while, the player realizes that this
new world exists on the face of the sundial, and the darkness is
the shadow cast by the gnomon as time passes.
#Post#: 91--------------------------------------------------
Re: Designing the Puzzle
DIR By: Pam
Date: June 7, 2021, 3:07 pm
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What makes a bad puzzle?
The key to the reasonableness of puzzles is to make their
circumstances fit the world you have created. You wouldn’t have
malfunctioning nuclear plants in a sword-and-sorcery fantasy
game. Nor would you try to summon a magical wizard in a hard
science fiction game. Good puzzle design involves looking around
the world you have created, and using obstacles, objects, and
characters that would naturally occur in that environment. Bad
puzzles violate not only this, but potentially several other
rules:
1. "Restore" puzzles
It is unfair to kill off a player for not solving a puzzle,
and only then provide him the information he needed to solve it.
For example, lets say a player innocently opens an unmarked door
and walks into a room. The door swings shut and the room fills
with poisonous gas. As he chokes and dies, he sees someone else
entering the room wearing a gas mask.
It may be reasonable enough to have a gas-filled room at
that point. And it certainly is easy enough for the player to
restore (or "undo") to the point before he entered the room and
to find a gas mask. But it is not fair. You gave him no reason
to think that opening the door was dangerous ahead of time.
Ideally, a player should be able to complete a game without ever
having to restore. In this case, you could put a warning sign
outside the door, or show tendrils of smoke escaping from under
the door, or any of a thousand other ways to avoid putting the
player in a position where you say without warning, "Bang!
You’re Dead."
2. Arbitrary puzzles
Effects should always be linked to causes. Events shouldn’t
happen because the designer decides it’s time for them to
happen. This happens most frequently when the designer doesn’t
want to let the player leave an area until he has solved all of
the puzzles there. So he simply waits until the last of these
puzzles has been solved, and then magically allows the player to
proceed, without explaining how solving that set of puzzles
logically led to his new capability.
3. "Designer" puzzles
Avoid, too, those puzzles that make sense only to the
designer. Just because the connections are clear in your head
does not mean they will make sense to the player. The best
defense against designing these kinds of puzzles is a good
testing corps. Bounce your ideas off people. If you have to
explain how the puzzle works (or why) more than twice, you
should either simplify or abandon it.
Problems also arise when the designer sets out to prove
that he is smarter than the player. Perhaps you know some arcane
bit of information, or are aware of a little-known relationship
between two people or events. It is tempting to make this the
core of a puzzle, and when the player fails to solve it, only
then reveal the information. Resist this temptation. You are as
much the player’s partner as his adversary. He is relying on you
to give him the information he needs to play the game. He will
admire you more for playing fair than for parading your
storehouse of unusual knowledge.
4. Binary puzzles
Avoid binary puzzles. These are puzzles with "yes" or "no"
answers that yield instant success or failure. If you open door
#1, you die; if you open door #2, you win. It becomes but the
work of a moment to try door #1, fail, restore, and open door
#2. This is one of the most common errors that inexperienced
designers make. They create "Lady or the Tiger" puzzles that
gamers will blow right by without expending more than two
seconds of creative thought. In cases where you give the player
choices, give him lots of choices, and make it difficult to
simply choose, fail, and restore.
5. "Hunt the pixel" puzzles
With the advent of graphical interfaces, another trap has
been created for designers who don’t work closely enough with
their artists - the "hunt the pixel" problem. Sometimes an
important object on the screen is so small that it is easy to
overlook. This is usually created by problems of scale. If the
room is large and the object is small, the player may overlook
it.
Solutions to this problem are to:
a) Make the object stand out against the background through
contrasting color or animation,
b) Move the object into the foreground, or as a last resort,
c) Make the "hot spot" for the object larger than the object
itself. Thus, when the player is "scanning" the screen (running
the mouse back and forth across the picture to see what object
names light up), he has a better chance of stumbling across the
item. This will also help reduce player paranoia, which I
discuss elsewhere.
It is very unsettling for a player to worry that the reason
he can’t solve a particular puzzle is because there is some tiny
area of the screen he has overlooked. If he finds out that this
is the case, he will get mad at you.
#Post#: 92--------------------------------------------------
Re: Designing the Puzzle
DIR By: Pam
Date: June 7, 2021, 5:51 pm
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What makes a good puzzle?
Many of the above design problems yield puzzles which a
player not only fails to solve, but which he eventually learns
he never could have solved. This leads to a "poisoning of the
well," an unhealthy skepticism in players’ minds that the
designers aren’t playing fair. It is essential to learn the
elements of good puzzle design so that players will learn to
trust you.
Fairness. In a fair game, the answer to every puzzle is
contained within the game. In addition, a player should
theoretically be able to solve it the first time he encounters
it simply by thinking hard enough (assuming he has been
presented with all the information). Like a good mystery novel,
it isn’t fair to wait until the last page, only to have the
author reveal previously-withheld information that identifies
the murderer.
Natural to the environment. With due respect to games which
plop logic or mathematical puzzles into the middle of the story,
that is not the way to move a narrative along. The best puzzles
fit naturally into the story and give the player the opportunity
to learn more about the people, the setting, and the world they
are exploring.
If you enter a room and the first thing you encounter is a
"magic square" puzzle that seems to have dropped out of nowhere,
all suspension of disbelief is gone, all the magic of the
environment evaporates, and the player might as well be reading
Games Magazine.
Instead, imagine that you enter a room and discover a door
blocked by a woman whose head is bent in sorrow, tears falling
from her eyes. To get through the door, you need to dislodge the
woman, but she is so distraught that you cannot get past. NOW
you’ve got something. Who is this woman? Why is she crying? What
will it take to make her stop crying?
To find the answers you will have to talk with her or
someone else, learn a little about her background, or look
around in other spots to find something that might mollify her
grief. All these activities are drawing you into the story. They
make you explore the setting and the motivations of the
characters who populate this world. If the backbone of good
fiction is character, the backbone of good interactive fiction
is puzzles that involve those characters.
Amplify a theme. Ideally, a puzzle should amplify the theme
of the game, if there is one. You shouldn’t have the player
taking actions contrary to the character you have set up. The
actions must be reasonable things for his character to do. You
wouldn’t expect an animal rights activist to gain access to a
high-security compound by shooting the guard dog.
The "V-8" response. The sign of a great puzzle is the V-8
response. When the player finally gets the answer he hits his
hand to his forehead and says, "A HA! Of COURSE!! How could it
have taken me so long to figure it out?" The sign of a bad
puzzle is when he says, "There is no way I could ever have
solved that. I don’t even understand it now! Why does this work?
Oh well, either I’m just stupid or this game is really unfair."
#Post#: 93--------------------------------------------------
Re: Designing the Puzzle
DIR By: Pam
Date: June 7, 2021, 6:05 pm
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Levels of difficulty
In the early days, games were difficult. Now games are
easier. Whether it’s due to the advent of the mass market, the
"poisoning of the well," or a shortened player attention span,
you have to be very aware of how difficult your puzzles are.
Fortunately, one of the easiest parts of designing a puzzle is
adjusting its level of difficulty.
1. Bread Crumbs
One of the easiest ways to adjust the level of difficulty
is to change the amount or directness of the information you
give the player. Remember Hansel and Gretal walking through the
forest, dropping bread crumbs behind them so that people could
pick up their trail? The bigger the bread crumbs and the more
frequent they are, the easier it is for the player to find his
way through the woods.
For example, Let’s say you have created a wall safe that
the player knows contains vital information. If you tape the
combination on the wall next to the safe, it is scarcely a
puzzle at all for the player to read the combination and use it
to open the safe. If you hide the combination under the rug in
that room, the puzzle becomes a little more difficult, because
the player has to lift the rug to find it. Still not all that
difficult however.
Now let’s say that instead of writing out the combination,
you put a picture on the desk in the room of a smiling older
couple with the inscription "Happy Anniversary: 6-9-93" It would
be a little more difficult for the player to make the jump that
the date on the picture might be the combination of the safe.
Now let’s change the inscription to "Happy 50th Anniversary,
June 9, 1993." It requires even more thinking for the player to
think that the person owning the safe might consider the wedding
day more memorable than the anniversary of it, and therefore he
should subtract 50 from the 93 to get a combination of 6-9-43.
The next step would be to put the picture not on the desk,
but in the owner’s wallet, which you discover in a trash can on
the other side of the city. Finally, if you really want to be
cruel, you could make the man British, so the combination should
be 9-6-43, because the English order their dates by
day/month/year, rather than month/day/year. (If you don’t
mention this idiosyncrasy elsewhere in the game, however, you
are falling victim to the "designer puzzle" trap mentioned
earlier.)
2. Proximity of puzzle to solution
Although in a fair game, the answer to every puzzle is
contained within the game, how close the designer puts the
answer to the problem will determine how easy the puzzle is.
This is true both psychologically and geographically. If it’s
late in the game and the answer involves remembering an arcane
bit of information you supplied in a side comment back at the
beginning of the game and half the world geography away, that
puzzle will be difficult. The more attention you drew to that
side comment, the easier the puzzle will be. When confronted
with the puzzle near the end of the game, if a character pipes
up and reminds the player of that side comment, the puzzle gets
easier.
3. Alternate solutions
Another way to make a game easier is to provide alternate
solutions to puzzles. The problem with this is that they can be
expensive to implement because of the increased graphic
requirements, and they may make the game too easy. Also, it’s
hard enough for the designer to robustly handle one solution,
much less two.
4. Red Herrings
One way to make a game harder is to include red herrings,
although I seldom do. I believe players spend so much time
making up their own scenarios that it is completely superfluous
for me to do so as well.
5. Steering the Player
This brings us to responding to player inputs that don’t
actually solve puzzles. You should constantly be steering the
player toward the right answers to the puzzles by providing
little (or big) clues in the responses you make to his inputs.
Responses should contain little nuggets of information, so
that the longer a player sticks to it and the more things he
tries, the more knowledge he accumulates about what might work.
You should help him circle in on the solution, never being
entirely obvious, but providing enough bits of data that
eventually a critical mass will be reached and he will realize
what he is supposed to do, all without feeling he has cheated by
going off and looking for a hint.
#Post#: 94--------------------------------------------------
Re: Designing the Puzzle
DIR By: Pam
Date: June 7, 2021, 6:17 pm
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How to design the puzzle
Having learned about different puzzle types, good and bad
design, and adjusting levels of difficulty, how do you go about
actually creating the puzzles?
In any story, the author creates a character and gives him
a goal. But in a good book, the path to the goal is never easy.
Myriad opponents stand in the way - bad guys, nature, internal
conflicts, fate - all these conspire to litter the hero’s path
with obstacles. If the path were easy, the book would be dull.
The same is true of adventure games. If the player can click
through a game in two hours, he is not making significant
choices, and he is not getting his money’s worth.
Creating the puzzle
So you begin where any author begins, with your story and
characters. You create a setting and populate it with
interesting characters. Then you create the role of the player,
and give him an overall goal. As you break the story down into
scenes, you establish a sub-goal for each scene that fits into
the overall story. Within the scene, you must create obstacles
that hinder the player from reaching the sub-goal. Those
obstacles are the puzzles.
Consider the opening sequence of the movie Raiders of the
Lost Ark. In the movie, Indiana Jones emerges from the jungle to
stand before a waterfall. He puts together two pieces of paper
to form an old map. This establishes the goal - treasure!
In the next few minutes he flicks a gun away from a man
with his bullwhip, enters a cave full of poisonous spiders, puts
his hand in a shaft of light to set off a booby-trapped wall of
pointed spikes, swings on his whip over a bottomless pit, uses a
torch to spring a paving stone trap, swaps a weighted bag of
sand for the golden idol, and then runs for his life to
outsprint a huge rolling boulder.
In each of these cases, the hero was presented with threats
or obstacles that were appropriate to the exotic setting. And in
each case, he used the material at hand to overcome the problem.
The job of the puzzle designer is exactly that, to create
threats and obstacles that are appropriate to the story and the
setting, and to give the player the means to solve those
problems in a way that make sense within the story’s genre.
So as you approach the problem of puzzle design, think of
the character you have created. Think about where he is trying
to go and what he is trying to do. Then think about reasonable
obstacles to place in his path. Finally, using the principles of
good design to make the task fair and reasonable, give the
player the means to get past the obstacles.
Player Empathy
To determine what is "fair and reasonable" you need to be
able to put yourself in the player’s shoes. You need to develop
what I call "player empathy." This is the ability to look at the
game from the player’s point of view, even though the game is
still nothing more than a swirling design in your head. You
must, as the potential player, be able to say, "This is the
situation I’m in, and here is what I’ve been told. I know my
long term goal, and I know my short term goal within this scene,
but right now I’m being blocked by these two problems. Now… how
am I going to solve them?"
Once you can look at the game from the player’s point of
view, you can anticipate the kinds of things he is going to want
to try. And once you have learned to anticipate his moves, you
can give him a better game experience by writing non-default
reactions to them.
Another part of player empathy is letting the player know
where the puzzles are. In a game, anything the player can’t do
is likely to be perceived by him as a puzzle. It’s up to the
designer to let him know when this is true and when it’s not.
Players have enough trouble solving the real puzzles in the game
that we don’t need them chasing off to solve puzzles that aren’t
really there.
For that reason, it is sometimes useful to let the
architecture of the game show through. "You can’t go that way"
used to be a response that would annoy game players because they
wanted a reason. But when the player has bumped up against the
limits of the world, it is important to let him know, so that he
doesn’t think this limit is just another obstacle to be
circumvented. If you had said instead, "A large boulder blocks
your path", it is reasonable for the player to think that his
next task is to move that boulder. If this isn’t a puzzle you
want him to be solving, you must say so in the most unambiguous
language you can muster.
This idea of player empathy is so important that I consider
it to be the single greatest indicator of whether or not a
person can be a successful game designer. If you cannot learn to
put yourself inside the player’s head, you will never be able to
design a game that will capture and hold someone’s attention.
You must learn to "play the movie in your head" and anticipate
what the player is going to try. Only then can you "steer" him
towards the right answers, respond to his off-the-wall inputs,
and ensure at every turn that he is always having fun.
Summary
As a puzzle designer, make sure your puzzles enhance the game,
rather than detract from it. Use puzzles to draw the player into
your story and learn more about your characters. Don’t withhold
the information he needs to solve the puzzle. Develop player
empathy and strive for that perfect level of frustration that
drives a player forward instead of turning him away. And above
all – Play Fair!
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