That seems like a simple problem to deal with. For your puzzle, simply have a usable coffee maker. Your command would be âUSE COFFEE MAKERâ. If you also require the player to find items to make the coffee, then the character would state that they donât have everything they need yet. Optionally, they could state what items theyâre missing.That avoids unnecessary operative details without requiring any UI redesign.
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Itâs not quite the same. To say âuseâ is to say nothing. So itâs equivalent to creating a game like Blackwell or the dig: you just click the coffee maker, and whatever must happen will happen. This for me is just like a cutscene. It seems to me completely different to compose âuse coffee maker to prepare-coffee-for-mr-jonesâ. Later in the game I will also have "use coffee maker to make-mr-jones-take-off-his-blazer. ".
I canât have just âuseâ, because then it would also have to work in the second case.
Instead , with my formula, you can abstract out detail somewhere, without abstracting elsewhere, losing puzzles.
Why would making coffee cause someone to take off their blazer? If the goal is to give coffee to Mr. Jones because heâs known to take off his blazer when sitting down to drink coffee, wouldnât the next step be to actually give him the coffee? That seems more interactive to me than a single command that sets the entire sequence of events in motion.
The fact you ask means itâs not a good puzzle⌠
The idea is that you intentionally pour the coffee on his blazer, so heâll take it off. And heâll give it to you to clean it. And youâll take the key in the pocket.
Keep in mind that I had no context for the situation. Lots of puzzles donât make sense without context. For instance, hereâs a quote from Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation fame regarding Day of the Tentacle:
It sounds pretty ridiculous and nonsensical by itself, but having played Day of the Tentacle, I completely understand the logic that ties those actions together.
That sounds like a pretty good puzzle. If I were going to implement that using a traditional interface, I would have âGIVE COFFEE TO MR. JONESâ act differently from âUSE COFFEE ON MR. JONESâ. Sure, thereâs the risk that the player might guess the solution, but proper clues should limit that concern. Considering what youâre trying to accomplish with the puzzle, Iâm not sure how you could get the game to recognize the significance of the blazer without making it an interactive object, and if you do that, it makes it a lot harder to click on Mr. Jones.
VR actually sounds like a good candidate for what you want out of adventure games, since it would force the player to act out what theyâre trying to do.
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is it possible that the problem was that I didnât tell you it was a puzzle? You thought it was supposed to be obvious how to connect you-use-coffee-maker and mr-jones-takes-off-jacket.
but if I had told you âthereâs a way to connect these two things. itâs not easy , but it can be doneâ, even without giving you any context, I assume you would have made it. no?
Wow⌠something as simple as a sign on the shop that says, âwe do house calls. Call us 24/7 with your wood emergencies!â would have been sufficient to seed in the playerâs mind the notion that the shopkeeper will leave if someone has a wood emergency.
I think someone suggested this at the very start of the thread.
I agree with @LowLevel that making the player state a reason for each action is insulting and absolutely not fun. Itâs almost as if @seguso were designing games to be played by robots and not humans. Good luck with that.
dZ.
Man, I appreciate the fact that you try to help. The problem is that your criticisms are often so abstract that I donât learn anything by reading them. Statements like âyou are antagonizing the playerâ or âtrust the playerâ are so abstract that they are not useful. How do I falsify such a statement? How do I measure that? What would it take to convince you that I am not antagonizing the player? I already said that, without asking the player what is his purpose, the sentence would not even be complete or understandable. The sentence âuse peg legâ does not make any sense by itself. So, if I ask the user âwhyâ, I am not antagonizing him, or insulting him: I am only asking him to clarify what he wants to do, so that I can understand it. Why do you assume that asking âwith what?â is so obviously better than asking âwhyâ? It does not seem to me like a particularly good way to ask him to disambiguate what he is trying to do.
So, a criticism expressed like that is too abstract to be useful. Same for âit is not funnyâ. It is too abstract. How do you falsify that? A constructive criticism could be to provide a concrete example where you had fun with the monkey2 interface, but you could not do the same with my UI. What joke or gag do you lose?
IIRC LowLevel responded that âcarpenter-is-known-to-leave-shopâ is an observation, not the result of deduction. (or could be turned into one)
how exactly did you solve the puzzle? were you told he leaves the shop, or did you have to deduce it from something else? If you deduced it from something else, then we can simply give the user that âsomething elseâ as starting point, instead of âcarpenter-usually-leaves-shopâ.
Probably âsomething elseâ will be âguybrush was asked to polish the peg leg on behalf of the carpenterâ.
Isnât this a general technique to solve the problem? Just ask yourself exactly what reasoning you did, isolate the starting points, and give those same starting points to the player.
the solution then becomes âuse peg-leg BECAUSE guybrush-was-sent-to-polish-peg-leg-on-behalf-of-carpenterâ. Sounds silly? Very well, then this is strong evidence that the puzzle is demanding too much to the user in the first place.
I think thatâs the problem we have communicating. You seem to be thinking of a game design as if it were a scientific thesis or a methematical theorem. I do not.
To me, game design is part science and technical constraint, but mostly art, craft, and creative thinking. There are no formulae for such things, it is mostly abstract thought with a sprinkle of luck. There are tropes and common devices we can rely on, sure, but they donât define the game as a formal theory.
I donât need to falsify an idea or a concept. If it sounds neat in my head, and my experience suggests it may work, I go ahead and try it out.
In the end, if I make a game for myself, I include the things I like. However, if I design a game for others to play, I should consider carefully my audience, their motivations, and their strengths; and include that into my design. I look for how to make the game fun for them, not clever for me.
âFunâ or âenjoymentâ â which I submit is the underlying cornerstone and purpose of games (at least the ones I want to play) â is not a measurable quantity; it is mostly subjective, with a lot based on shared experiences.
I will twist your words around just to illustrate how I feel when I read your posts:
Man, I appreciate the fact that you try to help. The problem is that your design suggestions and puzzle devices are often so technical, mechanical, and impersonal, that I donât see how they can actually be useful in a game designed for people.
I do not mean this in any way to offend you. You are obviously very bright and have a high affinity for logical thought. I just think that you tend to remove the âhumanâ from the equation when describing these ideas, which I think leads to flawed yet perhaps logical conclusions.
In the end, I exhort you to build your game mechanics and test them out. See how they work in practice. Also, see how others respond to them in practice. Theorizing about stuff can only get you so far, and it may send you in the wrong direction. 
dZ.
Hereâs the entirety of your initial description of the coffee puzzle:
Thereâs no mention of Mr. Jones or the blazer at that point, so I could only assume that either making coffee was a puzzle, or making coffee wasnât a puzzle, and you didnât want a straightforward task to involve unnecessary complication.
Your next bit of info about the puzzle was:
At this point youâve mentioned Mr. Jones and his blazer, but why should it be obvious that using a coffee maker would make Mr. Jones take off his blazer? Why would the player even want Mr. Jones to take off his blazer? I assume you would have clues that hint at Mr. Jones having a key, and that perhaps you would also have clues that reveal Mr. Jones is very concerned about cleanliness. Without those clues, youâre only guessing that spilling coffee on Mr. Jones would cause him to take his blazer off, and youâre only guessing that doing so would provide any net benefit.
To use a different coffee puzzle for comparison, would it make sense to âUSE COFFEE TO MAKE DR. FRED UNLOCK HIS SAFEâ? By itself, thereâs really no reason a player should expect that to make sense. But the game of curse gives clues. We know Dr. Fred drinks coffee to stay awake. We know he sleepwalks, and he opens his safe when he does so. And finally, we know that decaffeinated coffee lacks the stimulants that caffeinated coffee has. With those clues, we see how coffee will make Dr. Fred open a safe, but without those clues itâs just a nonsense statement.
As I said above, I assume you would have clues that make it possible to understand what needs to be done. Without the clues, thereâs no way to make the connection without speculation. After all, what if Mr. Jones was outside a coffee shop, and giving him free coffee enticed him to come inside to enjoy it, removing his blazer and hanging it on a coat rack? Or what if Mr. Jones is cold, and giving him enough hot coffee warms him up enough that he doesnât need to wear his blazer? Or what if Dr. Jones is so concerned about his precious blazer that he takes it off while enjoying coffee precisely to avoid spilling coffee on it? In those cases, figuring out what kind of coffee he likes might be the puzzle involved in getting him to accept the beverage. Or for a disgusting example, what if something like syrup of ipecac needed to be added to the coffee either to make Mr. Jones vomit or spit coffee out, soiling his blazer in the process? Or what if itâs possible to distract Mr. Jones in such a way that he accidentally knocks over a strategically placed cup of coffee when he returns to him meal? Or what if instead of distracting Mr. Jones, the tablecloth can be pulled to make the strategically placed coffee fall off the table onto him. Or perhaps pulling the tablecloth puts the coffee in just the right spot that Mr. Jonesâ own actions knock it over without having to distract him? And thatâs just for relatively straightforward solutions. What if the coffee needed to be spilled on the floor to make a waiter slip and drop a tray of food all over Mr. Jones? Or what if the coffee needed to be put on the waiterâs tray for the waiter to take to Mr. Jones, so that when the waiter is tripped by some other means, he spills coffee on Mr. Jones? Or what if the coffee needs to be spilled on Mr. Jones from some strategic location like a balcony, so that he doesnât realize who soiled his blazer? There are lots of potential ways to have a particular item be involved in a particular solution, but as Iâm sure youâve noticed from the examples I provided, they each require a different setup. However, they all have in common the requirement to use coffee in some way to make Mr. Jones take off his blazer. Often in adventure games, itâs not enough to know what needs to be done. Itâs often important to know how something needs to be done.
Sure, itâs an observation, but one the game madeânot the player. By having the game generate that observation, the game is explicitly telling the player, âHey, this is a clueâ. The player may not have initially realized the sign was significant, so the game telling them that it is becomes a potentially-unwanted spoiler. In the case of Monkey Island 2, there are unimportant signs that can be interacted with, such as the âNot responsible for stains left on clothingâ sign at the dry cleanerâs shop. If those do not generate observations, then any sign that does is an obvious clue. If the unimportant signs generate observations, then thatâs going to result in lots of red-herring observations in the âinventoryâ that will make putting together sentences very frustrating. After all, you were complaining about having to combine a few items for a puzzle where the solution was already known. Imagine having to click through potentially dozens upon dozens of observations to find the one thatâs applicable?
Unfortunately, itâs been so long since I first solved that puzzle that I donât remember how I determined the solution. And since I have such a long memory for the details in my favorite adventure games, I donât really have the luxury of playing it again for the first time. Though this whole conversation did give me the idea to record myself playing some adventure games Iâm unfamiliar with, and vocalize my thought processes as I play them. Zak McKracken and Quest for Glory 4 are good candidates in that regard, as Iâve played both of them before, but remember almost nothing about them. Since I know Iâve completed them once before, I can make a reasonable assumption that Iâd be able to complete them again.
Unfortunately, I did my reasoning process for that puzzle over 25 years ago, and have remembered the solution to the puzzle the entire time since then. Since I figured out the solution back then, there was little need to remember how I figured it out, and itâs hard to know what I was thinking back then. All I can remember was that the peg leg puzzle was not one of the frustrating puzzles for me.
Actually, that command sounds like it should polish the peg leg, basically achieving the same result as âUSE POLISH ON PEG LEGâ. Your example illustrates one of the complications of adding observations, as youâve accidentally put together a command that should still produce a valid result, but accomplishes a different task than the one you were thinking of.
And how are you going to handle the absence of certain inventory items? What happens if a player enters âUSE PEG LEG TO MAKE WOODY LEAVE THE SHOPâ, but they donât have a saw in their inventory? Do you tell the player that they need something to cut with? Because the pirate values a nice-looking peg leg, what if the player had a bucket of mud to dirty the peg leg with, but no saw? Do you tell them what theyâre missing, which effectively does some of the playerâs thinking for them? Do you just have the command fail without explanation, even though the exact same command should be able to work later?
Ultimately, I think DZ-Jay has a very strong point. Lots of ideas sound good on paper, but donât work well in practice. As has been proven time and time again in reality, there is often no substitute for experimentation. Some of humanityâs greatest discoveries came about by accident. Try your ideas out and see how they work out. And donât forget to have others test them.
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wow. You have found a real problem with the âone object + factâ variant. The user could compose that accidentally, believing he meant to polish the peg leg.
And such a problem will happen rather frequently, because a way to create puzzles is to first make the user use something in an obvious way, then require him to use in in an nonobvious way.
Fortunately, it seems this cannot happen in the âone object + objectiveâ variant, and in the âtwo objects + factâ variant.
You also wrote other important things, but this is by far the most important to me. Thank you
Here I donât see a problem. I assume if he has composed that sentence, he has already solved the puzzle, because otherwise these things would seem completely unrelated to him. So what I am going to do is: Guybrush goes to pickup the saw, then comes back and cuts the leg. (assuming youâve visited the location with the saw).
Alternatively, he could say âI should first find a tool to do itâ. this would not be a giveaway, because we know heâs already solved the puzzle.
But what if the playerâs solution was to steal the peg leg so that the pirate would need to buy a new one?
(I wonder: what does monkey2 do if you try to âpick up the peg legâ?)
note the player is thinking to steal that, but he hasnât said that. He has only said âdo something to the peg leg in order to have woody leaveâ.
Anyway, he has still solved the puzzle. thatâs the key point.
(because the puzzle is solved as soon as the player says âbreak or alter the peg leg in SOME way in order to have woody leave the shopâ)
to solve the puzzle does not require specifying every detail of the action.
in this case, the player has solved the puzzle, but at the same time he has only communicated he wants to do something bad to the peg leg in order to make woody leave, leaving the details to me. So Iâll simply have guybrush saw the leg (i.e. the game chooses the operational details).
I am going to reply to some other points you made only because they interest me a lot (but donât feel compelled to reply-- I donât want you to waste too much time.)
what if Mr. Jones was outside a coffee shop, and giving him free coffee enticed him to come inside to enjoy it, removing his blazer and hanging it on a coat rack?
Thatâs exactly what I meant. If I donât give you any context, you are still able to connect the two things (introducing arbitrary assumptions of course). In many ways actually.
Then, when I give you context, it will be more difficult, not easier, for you to connect the two things. (Because some of those connections will turn out to be incompatible with the context.) Thatâs all I meant, I wasnât implying anything in particular.
Any puzzle can be seen as connecting two apparently unrelated events. And the best solution to a puzzle is the one that connects the two events in the most economic way possible (making as few assumptions as possible, or as realistic as possible). And of course without contradicting the context, and using as much of the context as possible.
For example , the solution âbreak peg leg in order to make woody leaveâ is better than âbreak largoâs door in order to make woody leaveâ. They are both acceptable solutions, but the first is better. Why? Because the second one does not use the fact that woody has the peg-leg pirate as customer. (it does not use the context as well as the first).
Yes, however, in whatever way you solved it, you must have started from something. Just give those same starting points to the user, and there should be no problem. Have the user start from the same observations that you started from, and there should be no problem. But even this is too simplistic, as you convincingly reply:
Right. In other words you are saying that, in monkey 2, no clear starting point was given! the correct starting point itself was concealed among many other observations that lead to nothing, and are just part of the story. In other words, monkey2 bombards you with many observations, most of which are red herrings, but only one isnât, and you donât know which one is important until you can actually connect it to an objective of yours.
Very well. But we can still do the same, by giving the user many facts that lead to nothing. Only one will lead to something, the others are red herrings. You will not know which one is important until you are able to connect it to an objective of yours. Exactly like monkey2.
You also anticipate this, and reply:
True, you will have to scan many observations to find the one you are looking for. But in Monkey2 you have to scan many inventory items to find the one you are looking for. I donât see much difference. (it can even be argued that itâs a good thing, because it encourages to think and discourages trial and error)
At any rate (changing topic slightly) personally I like a style where the âobservation inventoryâ is very short (6-7 observations, or objectives), and there are many selectable objects in the room (about 8-12). This solves the problem above at the root: it wonât be too cumbersome to find the right objective or observation. (and I donât think puzzles lose much of important if you donât have to identify what observation/objective is important and what isnât.) But you will probably think the large amount of selectable object in the room will create other problems. But it does not seem to me to be the case: in the monkey2 UI, you canât have too many objects in the room, because it will become likely that one of them might become a substitute for the saw. But in the objective-based UI, I donât need to worry about this. I can have many objects in the room, I can have a knife and a sword, and this does not create problems. Because the user has no way to compose the action âuse sword with peg legâ or âuse knife with peg legâ. He can only compose the action âuse peg leg in order toâŚâ. So guybrush chooses the right tool automatically. See how this removes one major difficulty from the design? (note: of course he can compose the action âuse sword in order to make woody leaveâ, or âuse saw to make-woody-leaveâ, but to this guybrush will reply âI donât quite see how this can help making woody leave. Iâll need to be more specific.â)
I think that this issue can be greatly minimized in two ways: 1) carefully deciding how much information the game has to provide when the player looks at the sign and 2) providing information for every observed object so that the player has to understand which of the many pieces of information is the one that is useful to solve a specific puzzle.
For example, when the players look at the sign, the game could just add to the list of âthoughtsâ the description: âA sign used by Woody when he goes out for house repairs.â. In this way the important information is conveyed in a less helping form and itâs up to the player to realize that it is instrumental in solving a puzzle.
Well, we are discussing a narrative-based game in which the player has to visually connect thoughts to make deductions. I would consider it an adventure game but Iâm not sure if other players would as well.
I have in mind something like the thoughts-connecting interface of âSherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishmentsâ.
Iâve checked this out after your suggestion. I seem to understand it works by combining two facts (or objects), and it automatically draws a deduction. I am not sure though. Is this right?
If itâs right, I think that, in order to work, this requires that the two facts look completely unrelated unless you have already done the deduction yourself.
And it also requires that, once you have understood that these two facts are related, it is obvious how they are related.
I am not sure this second condition is always true in practice. (Iâll write two examples later)
Yes, it is right. But I was showing this interface only as a way to visually inspire you, not because of how it exactly works. It follows a logic that it very different from what we are discussing here.
For example, in that game you can draw and reach different conclusions. At the end of each case you can decide to arrest the âwrongâ person, if you want.
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Logical structure of some of the puzzles we talked about:
Legend:
- in blue: âfactsâ. They are given by the game. These are clickable items.
- in green: âobjectivesâ. also given by the game. They are clickable items.
- in grey: deductions: these are deductions you make in your head, never shown explicitely in the game (at least until you solved the puzzle).
- in yellow: abduction. This is a special assumption you make in order to be able to draw a deduction. It is only in your head, and not shown explicitely in the game until you have solved the puzzle.
peg leg puzzle:
wanted poster puzzle:
