The quest (The puzzle):
This is the aim of the game. You design this environment and characters
to do something; no one does this for the fun of doing it. This is an
important part of the plot, and should be either clearly explained at
the beginning of the game, or given as a hint, then gradually cleared
as the game goes on.
Rees sees that puzzles aren't part of the plot, but are instead added
later for variety of reason. He says:
"The most important reason for the existence of puzzles in a game
is to force the reader to experience the scene. It would be a waste
of all that careful planning if the reader could go from the start to
finish directly, without experiencing any emotional development and
character interaction! One way to do this is to have puzzles that require
for their solutions that the player has experienced the relevant scene
or scenes. Another way is to have puzzles that are in inducement to
sit still while a scene is taking place." (1)
He puts the environment and the plot ahead, and considers the puzzle
to be a natural outcome of this plot.
We can classify major game puzzles into:
- The first is to finish the level ALIVE.. This is normally a shoot'em
up game puzzle (or what we might call a quest).
- The second is to defeat the other team you are playing against; like
in sports and strategy games like "Age of empires" or "FIFA". This kind
of quest includes controlling a whole team, which means that you are
working on many levels to achieve collaboration between different characters
to work together as a team.
- The third kind is the most common in adventure games, you go through
several levels of complexity, collect items and find secret doors and
hidden places in order to reach a place where you have to do a final
mission. Collect items and keep them in store for the final quest, most
of them will be "magical potions" and "power potions" to keep you alive
after going through traps and battles with various amount of creatures
and aliens protecting the gate of the treasure, or the escape door in
some cases.
- The fourth variation is the cinematic type; your mission is to understand
your goal by getting descriptions and hints if you listen to conversations
between "bots" and read newspapers that might reveal some darkness from
your final quest. Your own participation in the conversation and your
choices would affect the story direction sometime (Final Fantasy again..)
The most interesting games in those fields are "Leisure Larry's suite"
and "It came from the desert". It came from the desert starts without
any introduction to the story, and you get to know the situation and the
general directions by talking to the locals, and you will have to judge
their honesty according to the situation. There might be times where you
would have to choose between two problems to solve if they happen at the
same time. Those require some thoughtful planning and strategy because
the choice you make might affect the rest of the game.
Final fantasy's method is to tell the story on different levels, so you
never know what is the next quest until you finish the one at hand. You
get a general description at the game manual saying that you are going
to save the world from a major war between two armies (the usual sci-fi
cliché), but you get into more interesting situations as you go into the
game.
Or writing game puzzles, C.E Forman wrote an article called: "Ten steps
to great game design " viewing his notes on game design:
"Use good puzzle structuring: don't just force players to wander
aimlessly from one puzzle to the next, halting their progress completely
until they solve the only available puzzles. Branch out your puzzle
structure and make it as nonlinear as possible. Interweave your puzzles
with one other and allow players multiple paths through the adventure.
[..] Don't make players solve the puzzles in the same orders every time;
give them some flexibility. The only point in the game where there should
be only one path to follow is at the conclusion, where all the branches
of puzzles come together to form a final challenge. Balance the difficulty
of your puzzles: it's no fun getting all the way to the end of an adventure
only to discover that the final challenge is the easiest puzzle in the
history of the universe? [..] Make your world and puzzle logical: If
you are writing a sci-fi adventure, pay attention to the laws of physics
[..] Realism is less of a problem in fantasy games, as much can be justifies
by the use of magic. The point though is to make sure everything makes
sense in some way. This is especially important in the are of puzzles,
the more realistic your adventure, the more it will draw players in."
(2)
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