Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
the solution quickly. But unless you design an entire game on this principle, players
may see it as just an annoying gimmick.
ILLOGICAL SPACES
Illogical spaces were a classic challenge in text adventures. If you went north from
room A, you got to room B, but if you went south from room B, you didn't neces-
sarily go back to room A. Modern games use teleporters to provide a similar effect;
the player may step out of a teleporter with no idea where it has taken her. In such
a space, the player simply has to wander around taking notes until she can figure
out the relationships among the various locations. Unless you offer some clues, this
is another puzzle that can be solved only by trial and error.
PUZZLES REQUIRING OUTSIDE KNOWLEDGE
Many adventure games include references to things outside the game world for
comic effect, but those references shouldn't be part of a puzzle. A game that
requires the player to know information from a source other than itself is unfair.
For example,
Haunt
offered puzzles that only players familiar with the movie
Monty
Python and the Holy Grail
could solve. It didn't really matter because
Haunt
was a
game made by a student for fun, but in a commercial game, such puzzles would be
unreasonable unless you explicitly make it clear that the game requires the player
to know trivial facts. If you want to make humorous references to popular TV
shows, movies, and so on, do them in narrative events or in an NPC's conversation
rather than as solutions to puzzles. Beware, though: Cultural references age quickly
and will make the game seem dated after a few years.
You have to be even more caref ul when developing games for foreign markets
because other countries don't always have the same idioms. For instance, the
action, “Wear the lampshade on my head,” could cause other characters in the
game to assume that the player's avatar is drunk, which might be desirable in
the context of the story. However, wearing a lampshade as a sign of drunkenness is
an American cultural idiom that might not be understood in, say, Japan. Again, it's
OK to make cultural references in your game; just be careful about requiring the
user to understand them in order to win.
CLICK-THE-RIGHT-PIXEL PUZZLES
A few adventure games with point-and-click user interfaces require the player to
click a tiny and inconspicuous area of the screen to advance the story for no partic-
ular reason except that that particular pixel is difficult to find. This is lazy design—
a cheap way of creating an obstacle for the player without any entertainment value.
Indiana Jones and the Holy Grail
, for example, requires the player to click exactly on
one pixel during the end game in order to duck under a swinging blade. For most
players, this is a tedious and irritating solution to a well-known movie sequence.
