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Categorizing Puzzles In Adventure Games
MarkN writes "There's hardly a video game made nowadays that doesn't involve puzzles in some sense. In some games they serve as occasional roadblocks to break up the action, and in the genre of adventure games the whole focus of the game is solving a set of related puzzles. I've written a piece for AdventureClassicGaming describing and categorizing puzzles in adventure games. Adventure games make use of explicitly designed abstract puzzles — they're explicitly designed rather than being randomly or procedurally generated, and abstract in the sense that all you need to do is figure out the right actions to perform, rather than making the performing of those actions be a challenge in and of itself. My classification makes distinctions at two levels: you have self-contained puzzles, which can depend upon using your basic verbs of interaction, solving some minigame based around achieving a particular configuration, or providing an answer to a riddle. On the other side, you have puzzles that require some external key: this could be an item, a piece of information, or an internal change to the game's state triggered somewhere else. From there, I talk about some of the possibilities and pitfalls these puzzles carry, as well as their use in other genres. I'd be interested to hear the community's thoughts on the use and application of puzzles in adventure games, and games in general."
Fscking jumping puzzles
My UID is prime... is yours?
Many games don't have a clearly enough defined goal.
Here in the UK, the Nintendo DS game "Professor Layton and the Curious Village" appears to be a big hit.
This is really a small storyline to hold together over a hundred small puzzles.
Perhaps the appeal of this is that people can dip in and out, leave what they can't do, and progress without one puzzle or action blocking progress along the whole.
well...it was a decent try.
you went over all your major points...broke up all subtopics into three parts (why is it always 3?)...but this seems like a generic overview of something obvious and the title is rather disappointing - rather than discuss how these puzzles are developed or how they need to be "designed" for the common fool to get moderately far in the game, you explain the main differences between a few puzzles. I'm sure anyone could name a few different types of puzzles, what makes them unique to adventure games? ...i hope you have better luck with future articles.
find the frickin' pixel type of puzzles in most of the available adventures out there
the combat system for those games are so based around elements and buffs that it is practically impossible to beat even basic enemies without hitting it with the exact right spell with the exact right buffs with out accidentally hitting its strong element and getting your megaspellodeath reflected right in your face. That and they are the only rpg puzzles that wanted me to through my controller at the wall (stupid prison in DDS2)
From the article:
"A point that Ron Gilbert, co-creator of Monkey Island, has made about adventure game design is that for most puzzles the player should be presented with a problem before the solution is apparent."
Now, I know my memory may be fleeting, but I do distinctly remember running around in MI with a ton of items in my inventory that had no sensible use until pretty late in the game (rubber chicken, anyone?). And yes, they were a source of ultimate frustration because they were the first few things in the inventory, they were so incredibly useless for pretty much any problem I encountered and they were sitting there until I almost forgot about them, so I didn't really think of using them when they were actually in order.
I agree, gimme the lock before the key, but it seems they did exactly the opposite in MI.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Nothing irks me as much as linear puzzles, where you have to solve A to get to B to get to C to get to D... Granted, some gates may be useful when they make sense -- i.e. you must figure out how to get on the space plane before you are given access to the puzzle of how to do an space walk.
Even then, many of the puzzles would benefit from a way to go back to the puzzles. Like if you didn't go EVA and retrieve the broken antenna needed later in the game, you should be able to go back and do a second space trip, not being stalled on the first space trip until you have done that puzzle.
The most successful Infocom games (apart from those that played on sex) were those that had a minimum of linearity, and where you could go back and get a missing piece later. Similar with games like Baldur's Gate -- where BG and BG II succeeded due to having non-linear puzzles within each chapter, the higher amount of linearity of Planescape: Torment and Icewind Dale was probably their downfall.
Oh, and let's not forget the Ultima series. Not only did bugs and bad copy protection ruin the later games, but the greatly increased linearity of the puzzles made the games tedious.
Worst of all was an adventure game (no name, no shame) that I bought based on blazing reviews. It turned out that I got to play it for about an hour, stuck on one of the very first puzzles, which (I later found out) required knowledge of American sitcoms to get past. Being European, and never having had a chance to see the sitcom in question, there was no way to solve that puzzle. Since this was also before the advent of Internet, there was also no easy way to find a walkthrough to get past it. So it went in the garbage. If the puzzles hadn't been linear, I might have enjoyed the rest of the game, and could have come back to that one puzzle later, once I had obtained the needed information.
Some of the puzzles in the Phoenix Wright games were irritatingly linear and basically necessitated that you throw aside your pretentions to rational thought and simply try and figure out how the hell the designers intended you to solve the puzzle... often blindly choosing between alternatives so the narrative can later elaborate on why you were right, while obvious paths of inquiry are left unexplored.
(eg, a guy was strangled to death, but you're unable to bring this up when the prosecution is going for a guilty verdict based on fingerprints on a knife... not to mention that there are other reasons the fingerprints couldn't have been conclusively linked to the murder. It's just a game of trying to guess the one magical way that the designer wanted you to progress.)
Many years of experience with adventure games, and games in general, have taught me that there is a simple scale for puzzles and conundrums in video games.
1: Easy
2: Normal
3: Hard
4: Rubiks Cube
Easy is for tutorials and first person shooters.
Medium is your standard fare throughout the game.
Hard is for final levels and bonus challenges.
Rubiks cube is seldom encountered, as to place it in the game would probably result in at least 2 points being knocked off the games score owing to frustration. They are increasingly rare nowadays as no professional development team would seriously contemplate including them, except in an optional "master quest" section or the like.
May the Maths Be with you!
Tomb Raider is one of those games where you have the "key" puzzles. You have no idea why some puzzle doesn't work, and there's a HUGE world out there, where anywhere in there the piece needed for this puzzle can be. And then the search begins.... Sometimes that can be frustrating, but on the other hand it can also be very rewarding.
I came into this thread expecting some reference to Soup Cans. I was incredibly disappointed.
A little anecdote for those who played Zork before it was called Zork. Dungeon anyone? I had the fortran source code back in a time before the term open source existed.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
I hate "hunt-the-pixel" type of interfaces too.
I liked old Sierra games (most with the text-input interface, and a couple with the point'n'click) that had a "describe the environment" tpye of command [ > look around ].
I was happy that some games feature a "show the mouse hot spot" type of command (Simon the Sorcerer as an old example, Moments of Silence for a more recent one).
And I think that DreamFall is one of the first adventure-oriented game that managed to avoid hunt-the-pixel moment in a non-obtrusive way (characters automatically look toward the nearest outstanding object - in addition to a "look around" type of command which helps to reveal hot spots). Now only if the adventure/puzzles part wasn't that much dumbed down...
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]