MI1 and MI2's puzzle design as flowcharts

[Trapezoid]

While doing design on a game, so I took inspiration from the amazing Grim Fandango design document and started laying out my puzzles and goals in flowchart form. The Grim Fandango flowcharts are quite simplified, so I looked around to see if I could find any other games illustrated like this.

Someone made a pretty cool flowchart of Monkey Island 1's puzzles (with analysis). It's a little disorganized, but perfectly illustrates how the gameplay style changes in different parts of the game.

For the hell of it, I tried making my own flowchart for MI2. I got as far as the first two chapters, which I think are the most interesting.



How I color coded it:
Green boxes are major bottlenecks, chapter breaks. Each is a main goal you're given for each chapter: get off the island, collect the four map pieces.
White boxes are sub-goals, which you learn of fairly early on in the chapter. They're repeated in the yellow boxes at the end of the chapters, ultimate goalposts before you can move on.
The teal boxes are actions that are mini-goals that you (probably) clearly identify before solving. You know you need Stan's crypt key; not because you're a kleptomaniac, but because there's a crypt you need to open.
The grey boxes are actions taken in service of the mini-goals, but through idle exploration and curiosity, or the occasional epiphany. There's no particular motive for winning the spitting contest, it's not obvious you'll need the prize. It's just there, and this is an adventure game. (Some of my teal/grey choices might be a bit arbitrary; I didn't spend too long on this.)

Overall, you can see how MI2's nonlinearity works. Chapter 1 is a simple experiment in distinct dual puzzle branches; there's really only one time they overlap (cutting the gator loose) before the end.
Chapter 2, on the other hand, has four major lines which intertwine in many interesting ways. First off, aside from Rapp's map, you can't make real progress on any of the lines until you've been arrested on Phatt Island. So there's a major cutscene and plot point which has to occur early on in the chapter.
From there, there are many little cross-steps that ensure you're making progress on all the map pieces somewhat equally. For example, you get the telescope while chasing Elaine's map piece, and then it's the final object you need to get Rum Rogers'.

Anyway, as silly as some of MI2's individual puzzles are, its overall puzzle structure is, for my money, the gold standard. It's just immensely satisfying to hop all around the game's world, juggling a handful of big goals. It strikes a great mix of puzzles with clear purposes and puzzles with surprising benefits.

What strikes me, however, is how opaquely some of the sub-goals are laid out for the player. MI1 was very obvious about this too-- these games love to hand you a shopping list of Pirate Trials, Voodoo Ingredients, and Map Pieces, always divided into three or four. That's fun in a lighthearted fantasy game, but you can't always be so obvious. Can anyone name games with (at least a chapter of) similarly non-linear goals that accomplish this in a more organic way?

I made this with yED, if anyone wants to try.

[Andail]

Wow, good stuff. I bet there's plenty to learn here in terms of pacing and gameplay "flow".

[Gribbler]

Great stuff! Thanks for posting this.

[AprilSkies]

Hey Trapezoid, Thanx!
It's really interesting for me!

I do something like that for my games, with pencil on paper, but it's so interesting to see a flowchart referred to "the" adventure game.

[CaptainD]

I really SHOULD flowchart my puzzles.  But I only do it very occasionally... it's kind of mapped out in my head (to a degree, anyway... ).

[Trapezoid]

Yeah, I'm positive a big flowchart like this was used in the design process for LucasArts' games. On a similar note, does anyone know if MI2's Lite mode was designed first and built up, or Hard mode and stripped down?

[Eric]

Hey, thanks for the link to yED. I was using Gliffy to do this same thing for my own game before they required me to start paying them a monthly fee to keep my chart private and to give me room to expand.

I'm interested in seeing what your own flowcharts look like, Trapezoid (and anyone else!). It's interesting that, even without reading any of the text in the Monkey Island charts you've put together, you can still see the basic flow of the game.

Here's what my game looked like the last time I worked on it as a flowchart:

[Trapezoid]

Yeah, I was digging Gliffy until I noticed I was on a trial. yED's not as smooth an experience but works well enough. Also trying http://www.draw.io synced with dropbox.

I've just started laying out some puzzles, but my attempts to set up goals that are organic and character/storyline-driven has, so far, resulted in a rather linear vertical line. That's why I wanted to look at MI2, because its structure is so fun.

[selmiak]

*zooms*

*zooms some more*

*sigh*

Eric, is that red sign a deadend on the left branch?

[Eric]

Nope! No dead ends! Spoiler:

Spoiler

That symbol signifies the loss of knowledge (as a result of being kicked in the head by a cow) that you have to recover.

[close]

I purposefully made the image tiny so you couldn't, hopefully, read it! Sorry to tease!

attempts to set up goals that are organic and character/storyline-driven has, so far, resulted in a rather linear vertical line.

One of the things I found useful about the flowchart is that it inspired me to change up the...flow?..of some puzzles so that they didn't follow the same line/order/type. The three orange circles are the major goals of the first act of the game -- you can do them in any order, and in fact, as you go along, many needed objects or information are collected simultaneously for multiple puzzles. The task on the left is a lateral thinking/object use series. The one in the middle is a harvesting inventory items series (this is the one that's incomplete -- that big empty space should be a list of places / objects to collect). The one on the right is largely based in discovering information through dialogue with NPCs and applying it in different situations.

[Trapezoid]

Finished the remaining chapters for MI2: http://i.imgur.com/xTdkVDJ.png
The last chapter is short but truly nonlinear--I think you can get all of the ingredients in any order. I don't know if that's necessarily more fun than the way Chapter 2 works, with various roadblocks in each goal dependent on making progress on other goals.

Here's a rough version of the game design I'm working on. I just started fleshing this out in the past couple of days, so it contains a lot of "?" boxes and big abridged chunks.
(don't try and read it, I fattened all the text.)

Working with flowcharts (and yEd's heirarchical auto-organizing tool) has helped me a ton with visualizing how the player is going to be experiencing the game throughout.

I have them starting out with simple goals, and fairly on-rails puzzle chains, which in Act 2 suddenly balloon up into an array of multiple pursuable goals. It also helps a ton with maintaining their sense of purpose: I've got my explicit objectives in green, and subtler ones in blue, so I can spot parts where the player might feel too unmotivated.

Finally, I can look at the way lines connect and spot puzzles that the player might accidentally solve before they're supposed to be. (Example, there's an important flashlight that was available at the beginning of the game; I changed its location to somewhere you can't access until later.)

[Eric]

One thing that I picked up from somewhere (it might be one of my advisors, Lee Sheldon, who does the Agatha Christie games), is that in the conclusion of an adventure game, you should limit the space that the players can/need to travel in, limit the puzzles so they're working toward one or two things at most, and make the puzzles much easier. If you've told a solid story, players are, at this point, getting swept up in the momentum leading to the finale, and you can streamline their excitement by paring down their experience to a handful of essentials.

don't try and read it, I fattened all the text.)

That's what you think! "Petter Wogan --> Telephone ol' Wogan." I know all of your secrets!

[Snarky]

"Talking to people. Asking them if they know of any photograph [unhidden?] in the building" "Take photo of [Wagon?]" "Hide the body" "Ask for help with [Doug?]"
...
Argh! Now you have me trying to decode the text.

[Eric]

No, no, no...I'm pretty sure it's "Telephone ol' Wogan." This game is set at the BBC:

[Trapezoid]

it's literally "Talking to people. Asking them if they know of any photogenic wastebins in the building." Don't ask.

[Trapezoid]

Ron Gilbert himself just wrote a cool blog post about this very technique: http://grumpygamer.com/puzzle_dependency_charts

LucasArts Confirmed. THIS IS HOW YOU DESIGN PUZZLES.

[Mandle]

Ron Gilbert himself just wrote a cool blog post about this very technique: http://grumpygamer.com/puzzle_dependency_charts

LucasArts Confirmed. THIS IS HOW YOU DESIGN PUZZLES.

Thanks for sharing that! A very interesting read