Adventure Games - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 561

■ Navigating mazes. Use mazes—confusing areas that make it difficult for the
player to know where she is or where to go—sparingly. Making a bad maze is easy;
making an interesting maze is difficult. A maze should always contain clues that an
observant player can notice and use to help her learn her way around.
■ Decoding cryptic messages. Many players enjoy decoding messages, as long as
you give sufficient clues to help out.
■ Solving memorization puzzles. These puzzles require the player to remember
where something is—a variant of the game Concentration. She can usually defeat
these by taking notes, but that's reasonable enough; it's how we remember things
anyway. The real challenge for you as the designer is to create a realistic reason for
a memorization puzzle to be in the game.
■ Collecting things. The player must find a number of objects. These may be the
scattered pieces of a larger object, a set of related items (such as 12 identical gems),
or simply miscellaneous treasures. Make the player meet challenges to reveal or
retrieve these items; simply finding and picking them up isn't really a challenge.
■ Doing detective work. Instead of solving a puzzle per se, the player figures out a
sequence of events from clues and interviews with witnesses. The situation doesn't
necessarily have to involve a crime; you could use any unknown event. Detective
work forms the basis for many police-procedure games.
■ Understanding social problems. This doesn't refer to inflation or unemploy-
ment. The challenges of understanding and perhaps influencing the relationships
between people make up a little-explored aspect of adventure game design. Most
adventure games limit characters to very simple, mechanical states of mind. If we
devote a little more effort, people, rather than objects, could become the primary
subject of adventure games, and this would make the games much more
interesting.
When designing puzzles, try to allow for lateral thinking of the players. If there's
more than one way to solve a puzzle, don't arbitrarily restrict the player to your pre-
ferred method. Obviously, you can't build in multiple solutions to every puzzle, but
if the player tries something entirely logical and there's no good reason why it
doesn't work, she's going to be frustrated. Only play-testing can tell you whether a
puzzle is too hard or too easy, and you can't adjust an adventure game's difficulty
by tweaking some numbers the way you can adjust the difficulty of games in some
other genres.
Conversations with Nonplayer Characters
From the original Adventure onward, adventure game designers have faced the prob-
lem of how to create realistic NPCs. Computer role-playing game (CRPG) designers
must address this problem, too, but in most CRPGs, an NPC's conversation is
defined by the character's role: blacksmith, healer, tavern keeper, and so on. The