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[of course]

Adding Rube Goldberg type puzzles only frustrates the masses and only disrupts the players' experience of the game world IMHO.

With every statement there's a big fat of course that in some games a Rude Goldberg device can fit the in-game universe perfectly. After all, isn't adventure gaming's single most famous puzzle a Rude Goldberg?

Also, this feels like we're verging towards strawman territory. I haven't said that I WANT Rude Goldbergs in every game and I sure as hell haven't read that argument anywhere else. In fact, I have had a terrible time with the Runaway games because there is simply no way to describe the puzzle design other than 'retarded' when you're taping together wine bottles filled with sand, perching the resultant hour glass on a fork and trading the package for a blank piece of paper, apparently impossible to acquire in any other way.

I think it may be games like that, that simply have shoddy, horrifically programmed and devised puzzles that are causing this push in the amateur community for a lack or radical reduction of traditional puzzles out of a fear of making the same mistakes. I think if people sit down and think long, hard and sensibly about puzzle design it shouldn't be that hard to get it right.

(Of course, people on this thread could have been thinking of Runaway-style design from the beginning, in which case I suppose I'd be in agreement.)

I do, however, harbor a suspicion that the enjoyment of solving overly difficult and/or convoluted puzzles, for some folks, is derived from other peoples inability or difficulty in solving said puzzles.

That.. erm, sounds slightly paranoid to me. There seems to be a real 'us' and 'them' mentality forming over the fault line here..

Loved La Croix Pan, this looks awesome, so I am happy.

(Brought to you by the Economic Messages of Finite Encouragement Bureau)

Aside from that, I don't think anybody is seriously suggesting "interactive movie" gameplay without puzzles;

Not consciously, sure. But when you read suggestions like

Thing is, those 'enjoyable' parts, don't really need a puzzle at all, and may even be more enjoyable for the lack of that kind of puzzle.

What other possible end-result is there for the game?

So then we fall back to

what is bothering people is primarily puzzles disjoint from gameplay - puzzles that don't fit in the scene, that disrupt the flow of the game, or that have a solution that doesn't make sense.

Puzzle design. A subject on which an exhaustive amount has already been written.

So... what goes onto the checklist? "Don't write bad puzzles"?

I just wish there was a better gameplay mechanic than these silly puzzles.

I gathered that - but the issue is that there isn't one. I think most people thinking about adventure games today are hanging too many design albatrosses around their necks.  'No dead-ends', 'no deaths', 'less inventory', 'less puzzles', 'one click interface'! Implement all that and what do you get? An interactive storybook.

I could be wrong, maybe somebody will think of the mythical new gameplay mechanic that isn't just a glorified minigame but even though I've read much pontification from people who want to do away with puzzles in AGs, they never seem to end their talk with a suggestion for what exactly they're to be replaced by.

In the end, I think all you can do is try to keep the game's feet on the ground - most puzzles in Broken Sword, for example, were fairly credible as taking place in the real world. (Albeit with more kleptomania than is generally tolerated)

When I finally saw the solution, I thought, 'who in the world would actually connect the dots with all these separate puzzles to accomplish one (out of four?) sub-goals to accomplish a main goal in the first act?'

Well I did without much trouble - it all seemed logical that I'd need Largo's clothes to go to the laundrey, and thus they'd need to be dirty etcetera etcetera.

At the same time it's easy for me to think 'who in the world would actually love getting out math paper and drawing a maze for hours when they're meant to be playing a game'.. horses for courses.

I loved it when the obstacle was passed, and I got my little 'prize' of a little animation, or a new room or item, or an advancement of the story (and that kind of feeling is one of the reasons I loved adventure games), but the actual puzzle itself was more often than not pretty silly and convoluted- eg. getting a bucket, filling it with muddy water, getting rid of the innkeeper to get into a room, placing the bucket on the door, getting him go to the laundry, getting a laundry ticket, to get the clothes. Do you realise that there was 1 major goal (which was itself only an item needed for an even greater goal), that went 5 levels deep? I dunno about you, but I didn't find anything enjoyable about the process itself, even if I enjoyed the...peripherals (the item collection, the overcoming of the obstacle, the hilarious situations and descriptions, etc). Thing is, those 'enjoyable' parts, don't really need a puzzle at all, and may even be more enjoyable for the lack of that kind of puzzle.

See, this is exactly why I can't understand the view of the anti-puzzle crowd - I loved solving that puzzle. And pretty much all the other ones in MI2.

If you cut out the traditional puzzle (which a lot of people are trying to do anyway, worryingly..) where are people like me going to get the fun out of the game? I mean, if you want to just cut to the chase, good luck to you, grab a walkthrough and have a good time. But *I* can't make the game any more difficult to solve.

The thing is, a game needs obstacle. And the adventure game naturally has puzzles for an obstacle. If you make it like an open book... it's not a game. It's just a story.

[No dead-ends]

The big one for most people I would say would be No dead-ends. I cann accept games where you die, but a game where a lack of a particular action will later make the game impossible to win is poorly designed. (If the game has multiple endings and said action is needed for a certain ending, then that is fine...)

Stick to the established rules. One of the most frustrating puzzles ever to me, in Runaway 2 involves using an inventory item on an exit. The only exit in the game that you can interact with. To me, I just felt cheated.

Reward the player. I speak for myself here, but I reeeally don't like it when a game has me complete a ridiculously difficult puzzle and, wa-hey, the player character does something stupid or somebody else drops the crystal ball you wanted etcetera and so you have do even HARDER puzzles to fix it all. I want to move forward in the game - I like puzzles but I play for the story and characters.

Hmm, I know this is an old thread now, but as seemingly one of the critical people on the forum feels the need to say - it rocks!

When I read about this game I thought to myself "There's no way it could be that good". I thought the same about Nelly Cootalot. I really need to stop thinking that..

Sorry if you have misunderstood but my posts haven't been directed at you - when I see comments like those of Blueskirt about game design I'm interested in seeing what exactly they're trying to say and want more detail - so I quizz them on points, hear their arguments and present my own in return.

There's no need to take what I say personally - I haven't directed any comments at you (something I thought would be unnecessary seeing as we're across one another's perspective) and I haven't even tangentially mentioned your game. Yet now you seem to assume that I have done both. I didn't even want to post until I saw Blueskirt's comments.

I haven't missed anything have I? This sort of conversation isn't somehow in violation of AGS forum rules, is it? Just I've had two reprimands about it in this thread and I considered it pretty normal human interaction and doesn't seem to earn any ire in any other message boards that I've been on.

Anyway, I'll be leaving this thread alone now. So long.

Bucketloads of fun. And, oddly enough, the first talkie AGS game that I've played.

"Here, try magic stick I find in woods" =  !

Come to think of it, may I suggest you brand this game with a soviet counterpart to American McGee?

Hmm, Soviet Knopfski?

A good remake in my opinion should make an older gem playable to a broader public,

We're in agreement so far..

it should mix the greatness of older games, with the accessibility of recent games (easier interface, less dead-ends and less unforgiving timers, etc.).

And agree... but this is in conflict with what you said just a moment ago about a remake needing a text a text parser. There's no way to really make a parser interface easier to use, especially if we're talking Infocom, and I think the parser is hard to see as anything but a step backwards in design. I know that old-skoolers are frequently dismissive of 'point-and-click', but there are plenty of ways to stump people in puzzle design (legitimately and logically) with a nice, easy-to-use interface.

Since the greatness of a lot of these older games was the writing, there should be as little text as possible lost in the conversion. Who in their right mind would want less Douglas Adams or less Steve Meretzky in their game, tell me?

Me. I don't think an unseen narrator shoving text into your face is good storytelling - yes, it's been used by Sierra but it's mostly a text adventure convention adopted by them due to the fact that graphics were so deficient at the time that they begun publishing adventure games. And, furthermore, Sierra were really, really good at it - when they continued using narration well into their hay-day it complemented the plot and never felt like it was taking away from it.

This doesn't mean that I believe in cutting all the text out - it just needs to be worked into the story in other ways and giving some careful consideration.

Same with the puzzles, they should be as rewarding as they were in the originals.

Well, of course. But we can't work on the assumption that they were perfect when they were made.

But a graphical adventure game doesn't have to be absolutly in 3rd person perspective or features animations.

No. But it works.

The more I read, the more it sounds like the Flash version of HHGTTG on the BBC website is what you want in a remake..

There's the persons who played and liked the original, there's the persons who never heard of them and there's the persons like me, who heard of the original but simply cannot play the original because of the bad design decisions that plagued this era, namely constant dead-ends and timers that not only become dead-ends or just outright kill you, but also remove the pleasure of exploring the game.

Well, I find them difficult to play because they have been made with the conventions of another era. So... I use walkthroughs. I know it's looked down upon, but these games really have become something of a different age.

And it's because I heard a lot of good things about the originals that I would like to play a remake that would be as close as possible to the original experiences yet accessible to a broader public than the hardcore IF players.

Well... each to their own. But text adventures and graphic adventures are entirely different media, and I think going halfway between the two can't be anything but a bad piece of design.

A bit off-topic, but how do you call it when a child rapes an adult? Anti-pedophilia?

Ooh, hang on, I now this one... it's 'really badly written erotic fiction', is it not?

Apparently the obscure teleiophilia could apply, as they seem to be termed by age brackets and 'teleiophilia' is a preference for adult partners - a phrase that actually doesn't serve much purpose in any other use. But... a quick perusal suggests that there doesn't really seem to be a word invented for that yet. Surprising, huh?

For the interface, you must understand that I don't want to solve dumbed down version of the most famous puzzles from the text adventure era. I don't want to click my way through the Babelfish or the Tea/No Tea puzzles, I want to solve them like people solved them back in those days. So, the game should feature a text interface, or at least a point and click interface with a text interface not unlike Leisure Suit Larry 7, or if a point and click interface is used for the entire game, a text parser GUI should be featured for such puzzles.

Very few line of text should be lost in the translation. A lot of these games selling point was their lengthy and humorous narration, reminiscent of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I don't want the animations and backgrounds to replace the narration, most if not every lines of narration should be featured in the remake.

But from this comment... do you really want graphical remakes? You're placing all the emphasis on text - gameplay through text, jokes through text. Surely graphics and text are akin to television and radio - one shows and the other tells. If most of the weight is being put on text, rather than graphics... surely it should be just text?

This is something I've been putting quite a bit of thought to because since playing the wonderfully obscure Bureaucracy: A paranoid fantasy I've had the idea of, sometime in the future, adapting it into a graphical game. BUT to me that doesn't mean having a few sprites standing around on screen while the player reads all of Douglas Adams' prose - it means looking at what the prose tells you, what the character thinks and how to work that into the game as dialogue and cutscenes and animation, looking at what bits only work in text, what new puzzles could replace them, etcetera etcetera.

Because, surely, the idea is to make a fun graphic adventure that people who have never heard of the original will enjoy? People who like the original can just play that easily enough and will probably prefer it anyway, so trying to make it form them seems like a bad idea..

Couldn't you cheat a little by having floating objects scripted as characters, thus allowing them free movement?

I can't speak for anyone else, but I think that the AGSers who would be interested in using ripped graphics would, generally, know how to get them. Of course, I could be wrong and, when I think about it, some of the good ol' backgrounds could aso be used as a reference point for people who want to do work of a similar calibre.

There is the matter of copyright violation, and LucasArts and Sierra traditionally being quite touchy about it..

This is pretty much exactly what AGS was designed for. Well, not as in made as a fan tool for creating new StS games, but for creating old-skool adventures. The best way to see AGS's capabilities is by looking and playing through some of the games that are made with it - but yes, it has been designed to make games to run in 800x600 so Simon's ye-olde 320x200 (I believe that's the resolution) will have no trouble. The only reason that not many AGS games have graphics that look like StS's is simply because they take a long time to make to that standard.

If you are so inclined, though, I understand that there are tools around for ripping graphics from games and once you have them they will be easy to feed back into AGS. Just bear in mind that most people in the AGS community are fairly unimpressed when they see ripped graphics.

AGS is a very powerful tool, and if you have the patience and time creating a new Simon game shouldn't be very difficult at all. In fact, I think this thread gives an indication of how versatile AGS is..

I'm really not hostile and if you have any ideas of what we really should implement really do hit us. I mean it.

Well... the thing is just that the adaptation seems too straight to me. It brings with it a lot of the foibles of the text adventure in spite of the fact that it's a graphic adventure.

What I meant about Arthur being a mute automaton was the fact that he wanders around doing your bidding with no semblence of a personality until the brief Prosser scene, also the only time that I saw him say anything. In the meantime we have the Guide yabbering on about 'You' constantly.

In the text adventure the character of Arthur doesn't really exist as such because the player subsumes his role rather than truly playing it - and this works in a text adventure because it really is all about you doing things in the first person. But graphical adventures have traditionally placed a greater emphasis on the player character's personality and it seems something of a waste not to use this when the main character is somebody with as much personality as Arthur Dent.

Similarly, the puzzles have been designed to be solved with a text parser. It's very easy to type 'wear dressing gown' and 'look in pockets', but consideribly less intuitive to use dressing gown, scroll through your inventory, select dressing gown, use the gown on yourself, re-open the inventory, and look at the dressing gown.

It isn't a matter of anything in particular I want to be added into the game - I just think that you need to bear in mind the differences between a graphical adventure game and a text adventure, and not be afraid to change things to this end.

After playing the 'old' demo this afternoon (surprising because I didn't even know I'd downloaded it..) I.. have to say I'm not sure about what the idea of this project is. I mean, I gather it's meant to be an 'updating' of Infocom's text adventure, but when the game remains as apparently unchanged as this it becomes a bit counter-intuitive. From what I played the only 'new' dialogue was straight from the book (well, and probably the radio play which we didn't get here in Oz..) and having an unseen narrator explain what everything was to me while Arthur trundled about like a mute automaton was quite a blatant hang-over from the text version.

So.. not wanting to sound rude... I have to ask what is being added to the game in this update? Because, at the moment, it seems to be all about the text, which is all there in the original vesion anyway and in a more accessible format.

Like Chzo's motives. Firstly, don't confuse Chzo with the Cult. They are two different things. It was the Cult's plan to destroy the bridge, Chzo had a different agenda. He probably didn't even want to intervene with it. I mean, he's the closest thing to a god, and is barely seen in the game, so I can't really understand why people try and work out his motivation. In fac, if anything he could have been seen as TRYING to prevent it form happening by sending the arragont man to kill the clones.

Ironically you yourself seem to have misunderstood the plot. Nobody in the cult is trying to destroy the bridge. They are trying to destroy John DeFoe's mind which will make the bridge - and Chzo does not try to prevent it. The Tall Man is working against his Master's wishes to try and prevent it because he knows he dies at the birth of the New Prince.

As for time-travel and time loop. For god's sake, do you not get the point of this game? The basic story behind it? It's all about the past affecting the present as well as the future affecting the present. Past, present, future all one big blur. Which is PERFECT if the game is about tying up loose ends.

From my point of view, the ending was quite unsatisfying that it all turned out to be much ado about nothing. That everything that happened was simply about getting Chzo a new minion and that Somerset uses his superpowers simply to transform himself into the biggest Uncle Tom in the Universe.

I think it's very debatable that the game was actually about 'tying up loose ends' either. There is no 'Czho mythos' in the series at all before TN. Before that, the stories are essentially shock horror slashers that are definitely scary but nowhere near as deep as the AGS community would have you believe. In fact, 7DAS is very shallow and crude IMO. More than anything else, TN feels like a deliberate lengthening of the series through a slightly forced retcon to provide room for a third game. The biggest problem with it is that it needs to be anchored to the series, though - I think it is by far and away better than any other game in the series.

Then, I'm a critical guy. And I'm not surprised that people are very critical of Yahtzee, given his overbearing online persona and stratospheric ego. To give him his dues 5DAS is brilliant escapist entertainment, 6DAS is a great bit of storytelling, and TN sits next to Adventures in the Galaxy of Fantabulous Wonderment as one of the best AGS games I've played.

I agree to some extent -- this is absolutely a game that could win a little on adding more interaction. But I still think that can be done without sacrificing the one-click interface.

I didn't say that it needed to. My point was that when you decide to go for a one-click interface you've stripped the game down to it's bare bones so you need lots of interaction to make it feel like a little more than just clicking on everything.

I am generally opposed to the single-click style, but at the moment I've been playing the new Sam & Max games, which are brilliantly designed games period.

I know that the interface argument is a controversial old chestnut, though, so we should probably just agree to disagree.

Seeing the positive response that this game's plot has gotten, I might have to go and try it again - it must pick up in the second act..

Well, congrats on making your first game (And, er, hopefully that doesn't sound condescending because artwork is all I've done at the moment..) but I have to say that it really wasn't for me. I understand the arguments that a one-click interface works because most interactions are obvious, but at the same time I think it dictates that the level of depth suggested at by a more complicated interface is provided by something else - getting virtually no inventory and barely any conversation options I felt a bit cheated by this and that I was more of a spectator than anything else.

To me this just felt like an interactive 'choose your own adventure' book rather than a game - of course, I didn't get any far because I found the long dialogues with characters I didn't like rather tiresome.

That said - you deliberately didn't commit the gravest sin of amateur adventure gaming, which is of course no direction to the gameplay. For the short time I was playing I always knew what exactly my character was supposed to be doing and where to go to do it - so a triumph there.

Hopefully you've got no problem with a negative response, but my central criticism is that I think a game needs a greater level of interaction to create immersion. That said, it's very good for a first game and others are getting a lot of enjoyment out of it.