Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
then you fill it with deathtraps, he's in for a frustrating time. Nowadays, most
adventure games adopt a “fair warning” approach, making it clear when an object
or action threatens danger and (usually) offering a way of neutralizing or circum-
venting that danger. If you put a dragon in a cave, it's a nice touch to litter the
entrance with the bones of earlier adventurers. That ought to get the point across.
Most adventure games supply a save-game feature, so death isn't necessarily cata-
strophic; on the other hand, stopping to save the game does tend to hurt the
player's feeling of immersion. Adventure games shouldn't be so dangerous that the
player needs to save all the time. If you are going to let the player's avatar be killed
in your game, make sure to use an autosave feature to save the game at intervals,
which allows the player to restore it later, even if he hasn't explicitly saved it. The
player doesn't have to know that the game is being saved for him; telling him only
harms the suspension of disbelief.
Challenges
The majority of challenges in an adventure game are conceptual: puzzles that can
only be solved by lateral thinking. The following list of a few popular puzzles—of
the many types available—will help get you started:
Finding keys to locked doors.
Locked door
refers to any obstruction that pre-
vents progress and a
key
is any object that removes the obstruction. Because this
type of puzzle is so common, the challenge for you as a designer is to give players
enough variety that the door-and-key puzzles don't all seem the same.
Figuring out mysterious machines.
This is, in effect, a combination lock
instead of a lock with a key. The player manipulates a variety of knobs to make a
variety of indicators show the correct reading. Try to make the presence of these
knobs reasonably plausible—too many adventure games include mysterious
machines that clearly function only as puzzles, not as realistic parts of the game
world.
Obtaining inaccessible objects.
In this kind of puzzle, the player can see but
not reach an object, which may be a treasure or a key to open some door elsewhere
in the game world (remember that this doesn't need to be an actual key). The
player must find a clever way of reaching the object, perhaps by building some
device that gives her access.
Manipulating people.
Sometimes an obstruction is not a physical object but a
person, and the trick is to find out what makes the person go away or lets the player
pass. If it's a simple question of giving the obstructor something he wants, then the
problem is really just a lock-and-key puzzle. For a more creative approach, create a
puzzle in which the person must be either defeated or distracted. The player should
have to talk to him to learn his weaknesses.
