Checklist of adventure game ideals

[miguel]

Inventory items and interface can be THE PUZZLES!

In fact, everything you have been talking here is very important to the genre. It's hard to appeal to a younger generation that does not have to think when the puzzles and difficulties on adventure games are badly made.
Why can't I just smash that window with a kick? I play the role of this hero cop, so why can't I do hero stuff? I can get hurt? Well, I want to try it anyway!
Why can't I just use this screwdriver on something else than a screw? I have to go mad looking for a kitchen knife but the sword on the wall will not do the job?
When you have a gun with you but are not allowed to shoot that lock you want to open and spend half an hour looking for a key it just gets you frustrated.
And what about the time it takes you to open that inventory window, select the pick up button, pick the inventory item, close the inventory window, use it on the object and :
  "That doesn't work here".
  Well thank you very much.

So, for most commercial games these days, the inventory and the interface are the real puzzles!

[Radiant]

Put in a funny narrator(a funny not too funny or boring)

Which reminds me...

Be careful about witty narrators, because they can quickly become tedious if they're not actually funny. Putting puns everywhere tends to quickly fall flat; and getting twenty textboxes in a sequence when LOOKing at a TREE also gets old really quickly.

You don't have to try to make everything funny. Your jokes will stand out better if the entire game is not already covered in a glop of low-grade humor. This is why Monkey Island is so much funnier overall than Leisure Suit Larry.

[TerranRich]

Make Sure Your Innovations Aren't Cumbersome and Unnecessary

If you're making a unique interface, make sure it doesn't take an entire minute to animate and then be available for clicking. Or if you're adding in a unique feature, make sure it has a purpose and is useful.

Say you have a nice little Ouija board interface for the control panel. Don't blend in every single letter, only some of which have a purpose. And don't make it animate slowly every... single... time... you need it. (I know, I'm using the worse adventure game of all time, Limbo of the Lost, as an example, but it merits mentioning.)

[DanielH]

I vote for this thread to be stickied.

Never leave the character standing
Always have a clue to help them onto the next step, never let the Player ask himself
'Well I've done that, now what? Nothing is happening!'
Sublty lead the Plaer onto the next puzzle.

[Stupot]

I vote for this thread to be stickied.

Never leave the character standing
Always have a clue to help them onto the next step, never let the Player ask himself
'Well I've done that, now what? Nothing is happening!'
Sublty lead the Plaer onto the next puzzle.

I agree with this, but I think it's important not to hand your player all the answers on a plate... there has to be a balance...  so, the next ideal on the list should be Don't Treat the Player like an Idiot!

I've played games where you pick up an item and the character says something like "Oooh, there's a key in here... maybe I can use it on that locked door in the engine room"...  Now surely, if the player has already come across the locked door in the engine room, he can work out for himself that the key will probably work on that door and the first thing he is going to do is to test it... he doesn't need to be told... and if he does then he should throw his computer off beachy head before racing it to the beach.

[Ghost]

No "meta" knowledge
A puzzle should be solveable by your average player with the information provided
by the game. At no point should a player be forced to look up somewhere what the
Doomsday method is or how many neutrons are happily spinning in an atom. It's
okay to rely on common sense or everyday knowledge (mixing colours, as done in
Nanobots, for example), though.

Reward the player
When something relevant has been done, give some candy to the player. Do not build
up tension with a large or complicated puzzle and then smack it down with a flat "Okay,
I got a key." Instead, make a small and unique animation, unlock a new bit of dialogue,
maybe throw in an interesting new item. Make the player feel he did something *right*.

No hard punishment
Death is rare in todays adventure games but can be fun (think all the 'Quest games),
but: If you allow it, include an UNDO function. We're spoiled, we do not save for hours.
We need it.

[dasjoe]

How about putting all these points in some our wiki?

We've built the AGS wiki nearly three years ago, it's not used as much as it could (or should) be used and this thread's content would fit perfectly in there

Wikis are all about collaborating on stuff like this, maybe somebody is willing to write an article for these tips so everybody can directly add to them then.

See http://www.americangirlscouts.org/agswiki/ for the wiki, and as one rule on Wikipedia says: be bold!

[jetxl]

(We have a wiki?)

But these "ideals" are just personal opinions, not researched facts, conclusions and/or polls about design.

[Stupot]

But these "ideals" are just personal opinions, not researched facts, conclusions and/or polls about design.

True, but the majority of these opinions are things that most of us agree on and a large proprtion of us have played enough adventure games to make our opinions valid.  Besides, the good thing about wikis is that such things as this can be discussed and ammended continually by an increasing number of informed people.

No hard punishment
Death is rare in todays adventure games but can be fun (think all the 'Quest games),
but: If you allow it, include an UNDO function. We're spoiled, we do not save for hours.
We need it.

"Death" is a difficult subject in any aspect of life, but in adventure gaming doubly so.   Some people think that dying in these games should be banned altogether.  But as you say, Ghost, it can be fun as long as it doesn't cheat the player of hours of gameplay (although he who doesn't save regularly is a moron).  In some games, such as Broken Sword 4, you are immediately plonked back in time, to a moment right before the event that killed you.  I don't see the harm in that.  It's just an extra element of gameplay to make the experience that bit more exciting.

[Ghost]

...he who doesn't save regularly is a moron...

I learned that the hard way. It took about twenty hits from Mancubi, a sad "die while Diablo dies" incident and a broken copy of Dark seed. 

I am very much for the Wiki idea btw. I always thought we should have our own "Bill Of Player's Rights".

[TerranRich]

If it's not already up, I volunteer to compile the information into a wiki page. I'll call it the Bill of Adventure Gamer's Rights, how's that? (It can always be changed.)

[Ghost]

I'll call it the Bill of Adventure Gamer's Rights, how's that? (It can always be changed.)

Yay!

I admit that I took some of my examples from a much older Bill Of Rights which can be found here. Nice read, maybe we can adopt some of it too 

[TerranRich]

Done: http://www.americangirlscouts.org/agswiki/Bill_of_Adventure_Gamers%27_Rights

[blueskirt]

A subpoint to no-pixel hunting: There's also a different kind of pixel hunting, when one pickable object is hidden next to several identical and unpickable objects. Example: The broken mirror in Mourir En Mer, where one pickable broken mirror shard was hidden next to 10 identical shards, but if you didn't interact with the correct shard, the main character would keep telling you the generic "I can't pick that up." answer. The same thing happened in Teenagent IIRC, where a pickable rock was hidden in a mountain of identical and unpickable rocks. It's probably worst than your average pixel hunting, because you see item, but the lack of positive reactions from your attempt to take it makes you disregard the item completly.

In the same vein, if an object is present several times in a room or several times in several rooms, and you need to take this object, make every sightings of this object pickable, don't force the player to find the One sighting of this object that can be picked, unless if there is a special reason for that. In a forest, a stick can be found in many other places than this one poorly lit stump.

Test your game thoroughly: Bugs in games suck, and doubly so in adventure games. The game rules in most genres are generally well established, you fairly know what you can do and what you cannot do and you can generally recognize a bug when you encounter one just because the game rules will react in a different way than they should be, it's unfortunately not the case for adventure games. In adventure games, the game rules aren't explained as in other genre, the goal is to discover, by trials and errors, what you can do and what you cannot do. And when a bug manages to slip past the bug testing phase, it can sometimes be hard for the player to recognize it in the game and can often result in time wasted while trying to solve unintentional walking-dead scenarios.

[Babar]

Apologies for resurrecting a 5 year old thread, but who knows, new blood may yield new ideas!

I was faffing about on the AGS Wiki (something more people should do more often, I guess ), when I came across this:
Bill of Adventure Gamers' Rights

I looked around for the source of that page, and found this thread. A similarly themed (with cool links!) thread I also found is this: Fundamental Adventure Laws?
Anyhow, these are the listed rights:

    1 The Right to Skip Dialog and Cutscenes
    2 The Right to Freedom from Pixel Hunting
    3 The Right to Freedom from Monotonous Responses
    4 The Right to Exit a Scene Quickly
    5 The Right to Know Where Exits Are
    6 The Right to Freedom from Walking Deads
    7 The Right to Freedom from Unconventional Solutions
    8 The Right to Satisfying Rewards for Puzzles
    9 The Right to Freedom from Convoluted Puzzles
    10 The Right to Know the Goal
    11 The Right to a Streamlined Interface
    12 The Right to Logical Cause and Effect
    13 The Right to Fairness in Puzzle Occurrences
    14 The Right to Get Hooked Into the Game
    15 The Right to Experience the Back Story Gradually
    16 The Right to Know Where the Cursor Should Go
    17 The Right to Freedom from Useless Mazes
    18 The Right to Fair (or Skippable) Arcade Sequences
    19 The Right to Freedom from Reading Enormous Amounts of Text
    20 The Right to Freedom from Convoluted and Cumbersome Interfaces
    21 The Right to Be Treated Like an Intelligent Human Being
    22 The Right to Solve Puzzles Using In-Game or Common Knowledge
    23 The Right to Undo Death

First off, kudos to (the somewhat recently more absent) TerranRich for setting all that up. I encourage you to click the link and read the detail on each right. Personally, I'm not too sure about 4, 17 or 23. You have some ideas about the others? Any ideas on additions? Maybe some of them could do being rephrased or combined, or maybe set up as a series of contrasting rights, e.g. "The Right to Freedom from Monotonous Responses", followed by something like "The Right to Know if an Interaction is Meaningful".

One that I thought of (probably not phrased optimally):
"The Right to know what to expect from your game".
This kinda applies in several ways. Several examples: If I'm playing a serious detective thriller game, I shouldn't suddenly come across something like the infamous monkey wrench puzzle from Monkey Island. Or if I have an inventory item that has only ever behaved one specific way, it shouldn't suddenly become part of a puzzle where it is used contrary to its nature. Or if I have an extra interaction mode ("Punch" or "Lick" or "Tickle") that seems to only be used for jokes throughout the game, it shouldn't suddenly midpoint in the game, be required to solve a puzzle. In these examples, unless some indication is given to the player to expect or attempt such behaviour, it shouldn't be done. If you're building expectations in a certain way throughout your game, at least gameplay-wise (obviously, I can't speak in terms of story), those expectations shouldn't suddenly flip over or change.

I'm utterly ignorant on how to edit and write wikis, so I wasn't sure how to add a reference link to this thread there.



As a side-topic, more people should add more things to the wiki! I started out faffing looking for a bit of code for keyboard movement, but all I found was a page about a module from 2005. I'd help, but as I said, I'm clueless on how to do most wiki things (create entries, add multiple titles, format them, etc).

This is something of a huge suggestion (and possibly should be split off from this thread and added in the suggestion thread), but you know how wikipedia has those discussion pages for each of their wiki entries? Since the community is mostly built around these forums instead of the AGSwiki (or any AGSwiki discussion pages), it'd be cool to have like a separate sub-forum or something where threads would be the discussion pages of AGSwiki entries, with links to them (and links from the entries to their corresponding threads, of course). It might cause some SLIGHT duplication of information (if, for example, like this thread, an AGS thread is the source of a AGSwiki entry, which then has a discussion page of its own as well), but would really revitalise the AGSwiki, have contributions be more active and sustained, and would set up the AGSwiki as a one-stop reference to help people with specific issues, instead of the current method where they'd have to do several searches of the forums while refining keywords to realise what they need to look for, investigate entire threads to figure out whether the information is totally out of date, and then collect the help from several different relevant threads to solve their problem.

[Trapezoid]

Re: Puzzle obscurity and difficulty.

Some of the more inane puzzles in adventure games are the result of sort of cargo-cult design, where the developers don't really *get* what makes puzzles fun.

It seems like a no brainer, but you should always be asking yourself "What emotions are this puzzle supposed to inspire? How will it do that?"

An ideal puzzle has only one ultimate function: to give the player that "lightbulb over the head" moment. You want the player to arrive at your solution and feel like they're clever. That is what's satisfying about puzzles in any genre.

These are the ways you DON'T want the player to solve your puzzles:
-Through brute force (trying every object on every hotspot)
-Without thought (the game blatantly spells the puzzles out for them)
-By accident (an overly-simplified interface combined with a lack of inventory-based puzzles can lead to this)
-By walkthrough (your puzzles are too obscure and the player doesn't feel confident that they can solve them themselves)

None of those are satisfying! Of course, nobody can design a game that won't run into these sometimes, but an ideal puzzle leaves the player wondering for just long enough before something dawns on them.

That MI2 puzzle was likely designed with this in mind: The player would get stuck long enough to try interacting with overlooked parts of Largo's room, such as closing the door. As soon as they notice that it stays ajar (with a pointed squeak so it's not too subtle) they'll realize that it's part of the solution.

This may not work on all players, and the difficulty of alt-tabbing over to a walkthrough in 1991 affected game design and play. But classic games are full of carefully balanced guiding cues like that. Modern puzzle games as well-- when you play Portal, you'll probably solve every puzzle in the exact way intended by the designers, yet you'll feel like you came up with the solutions all by yourself. I'm sure there's some psychological word for it.

[qptain Nemo]

I agree with the sentiment and the most of the points you made, Trapezoid, but I'd also like to point out that I don't think there needs to be an obsession with a singular solution either. Sure, some particularly brilliant puzzles can benefit from having only one solution, because hey, it's really brilliant. But most of everything else doesn't. There's no need to make everything in the game world so damn unique and one-sided. I really enjoyed the alternative solutions in Kyrandia games and I felt they made it more fun and even added replayability. You shouldn't be able to solve puzzles just by trying random things with no clue about what you're doing, but I think you should be able to solve many puzzles through conscious experimentation and thinking logically. Which brings us to my another point.

As much as I treasure properly delivered lightbulb moments, I think there's a lot of obsession over the lightbulb moment as well. Yes, some particular puzzles deserve it, but adventure game designers often chase that so desperately that it results in a system, almost absurdly brutally punishing towards logical thinking. The obsession with difficulty in general also factors in. So what we end up with? You're supposed to find the solution on your own, it's utterly unique, it's not obvious or even logical in the immediate sense and the game will frown upon you until the very last moment when you reach the complete solution. And I don't think this is quite optimal. I think adventure games should reward logic more and should be more appreciative of the player's attempts at finding the solution and intermediate steps towards it, even if it means reducing the difficulty a little. So, I'd say yes, there should be subtle clues everywhere and they should be pretty much generously deployed on every other logical action taken by the player. Because I don't think that being able to get so ultimately stuck that you literally can't do anything in the game that would help your situation unless you know the exact answer is a good design.

[Ben X]

This is kind of getting away from the checklist! Here are two more:

No hint system unless it's diegetic (ie part of the world), like being able to talk to Dead Cousin Ted in DOTT or *cough* Dan in "Time Gentlemen, Please!". All the hints players need should be within the game's dialogue, environments, events etc, without having to include a walkthrough function. It implicitly gives approval to cheating your way through.

If you have a commentary, make a function where you can just listen to them all in a row without having to play the game again. It's bad enough when an action game like Portal doesn't have this, but with an adventure game it's prohibitive. (I nagged Dave Gilbert about this when he visited London!)