221 - Good puzzle design

Developer diaries about creating Neverending Nightmares.
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matt
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221 - Good puzzle design

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Puzzles provide structure and objectives to games, so they are a good mechanic to use. However, the best puzzles make sense in the context of the game world. In this diary, I talk about the challenges of coming up with a good puzzle.

-Matt Gilgenbach
Lead Frightener at Infinitap Games
Grabthehoopka
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Re: 221 - Good puzzle design

Post by Grabthehoopka »

Mostly outdoors, eh? I take it from the fact that you bring up indiana jones-style environmental puzzles as meaning that this doesn't necessarily mean it takes place in a completely natural environment.

Well, right off the bat, if you go with the idea of the main character having some kind of injury like I and some other people have suggested, you can present the player with problems that ordinarily would be simple to solve, but are now required to think of an alternate solution. Like, for example, the character's foot or leg is injured, so they hobble around and walking is extremely painful. An item of interest is hanging down from above, and when the player pushes the interact button, the character reaches up for it, but it's just out of reach. They try to jump, but wince and clutch their injury in pain. So, the player has to find something to use as a stepping stool. The same could be done for, say, having to climb up or down a steep hill, having to bust a door or some other obstacle down, or some other physically demanding task. If you use that to replace the asthma for the limited run, then it would do a good job of using the character's plight to dictate the challenges and game mechanics.

Speaking of injuries, one of my favorite "puzzles" that wouldn't feel out of place in a horror game was the lizard trial in Heavy Rain, where Ethan had to chop off a piece of his finger in front of the camera. The way it's built up and presented is really well-done, but I consider it a really well-designed puzzle, in the sense that it's not difficult, but it still rewards players who use their brains. Everything you need is right there in the apartment, and there is definitely a "right" way and a "wrong" way to do it, but the results are still the same. If you're some kind of crazy person, you can just grab the saw or scissors and just saw and hack away at your finger and then walk out the door, bleeding all over the place. But if you look around, gather supplies, and think your way through it, there's a cleaver, some alcohol, a metal rod, and bandages. You turn on the stove and heat up the metal rod, drink the alcohol to steady your hand, chop the pinkey off with the cleaver, pour alcohol on the wound, use the metal rod to cauterize it, and then put bandages on it. Same result, much different gameplay experiences.

All in all, I find treating injuries to be a very clear and effective objective. First of all, it tells the player plenty about the game world - there is no magic first aid kits or regenerating health in this game, you tell them, and the main character is just like you - getting injured or wounded is just as painful and just as much of a problem as it would be for you. Now, some games have regenerating health and try to pull this anyway, like Uncharted 2 or 3 and Tomb Raider 2013, where the character gets shot tons and tons of times over the course of the game, but if they get shot or impaled on a tree branch in a cutscene, then it just happened to be the one magical bullet or tree branch that can actually cause bodily harm to them and they have to deal with it after the cutscene ends.

Then, of course, there's the other way, where they receive a terrible, grisly injury and then act exactly like someone with regenerating health would act and show alarmingly little concern over it. Like Tomb Raider 2013, again, where she's impaled on a piece of rebar and the first thing she does is yank it out, and then shows no concern for what should be a gaping hole going straight through her stomach, her intenstines, and out her back, especially when she's wading neck-deep through disgusting stagnant water almost a moment later. That water should be leaking through her wound and into her intestines, and she should get infected head to toe and drop dead within a day, but she's fine. Tomb Raider truly had the worst of both worlds in that regard, but one of the most egregious examples I can think of in recent memory is Outlast, when ol' doctor nakedbutt ties your character down and chops off several of his fingers. Naturally, the first thing you do is break loose from your bonds. Now, I thought that immediately after you get free that the next thing to do would be to look for medical supplies, like immediately, to treat your horribly mutilated fingers. I mean, it's a pretty logical thing to want to do, and you are in a hospital, and in the medical wing at that, so despite it being old and shitty, finding some potable medical supplies wouldn't be entirely unrealistic. So as soon as the character breaks loose from his bonds, he naturally just picks up his camcorder and pretends that nothing happened. Despite the fact that we can see his hands, with his untreated, bleeding stumps, one of which has a clearly exposed bone sticking out of it. Nope. It's fine. He's content with shoving his finger stumps into doorways as he navigates around, climbs up ledges like a champ, operates his camera without getting a drop of blood on it. At that point, I realized that he was truly too dumb to live. Come to think of it, in The Evil Within, within minutes of the game starting, the player character falls into a vat of blood with an open wound on his leg and seems slightly annoyed at best. It's rare to see a game treat injuries with some weight and sincerity. I know that it might not be "fun", but I defy anyone to say it isn't compelling.

Anyways, to drag this thing kicking and screaming back on track, Heavy Rain got it right because it didn't have a complicated solution, but still rewarded players who thought their way through it. Just like the hitman games, which operate on similar puzzle logic; you can spend forever coming up with the perfect stealth run, or you can just shoot everybody. You get all the challenge with none of the difficulty. So that's why it's a good puzzle, and why I brought all of this upon you.
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matt
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Re: 221 - Good puzzle design

Post by matt »

Hmmm... Having the player injured and looking for supplies is a good idea. I was thinking that we might want to have a character that is a little more powerful than in Neverending Nightmares, since the asthma got on a lot of people's nerves. Having an injured player might have the same effect. I think I got a little tired of being injured in the beginning of The Evil Within, but I wasn't really digging the game world, so perhaps if I were more into it, it wouldn't have bothered me.

Still, there are plenty of injuries that don't necessarily cause limping. Multiple solutions is always good too. Something to think about but more work from an animation standpoint. I was hoping to expand the budget a bit for the next game, but I think we'll probably end up with something similar in dev time (although will probably need a bigger kickstarter since there is no OUYA FTGF), so we are going to have to be very careful how we spend our time since things were really tight on Neverending Nightmares.

We have more evolved tech and are improving our tools, so hopefully that'll give us a development speed boost.
-Matt Gilgenbach
Lead Frightener at Infinitap Games
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evilkinggumby
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Re: 221 - Good puzzle design

Post by evilkinggumby »

hmm thats the problem isn't it? we want to do more puzzles.. but we don't want to overcomplicate the game with tons of controls, extra UI, inventory items and puzzle-y type stuff that doesn't fit into the themes of the game.

I say the best way to do puzzles is to not think PUZZLE but think OBSTACLE. The darkness was an obstacle in NeN. The boarded door was an obstacle. Enemies were obstacles. If you shift the mindset from "mind bending puzzles" and instead think of intuitive and naturally occurring obstacles, the challenges present themselves and you are then open to think of how (or how many ways) one can get past them. In old point and click adventure games, I always appreciated when the developers had multiple possible ways to get past a obstacle, depending on the players imagination.

When going through outdoor areas, this would work in tons of situations. You need to get in your car and drive home but a large tree has fallen over the driveway. You could locate an axe and try to hack it to bits. You could locate a gas can and a chainsaw and chop it up as well. Or you could locate the gas can and burn the tree to cinders. This is a "puzzle" but really it is an obstacle to overcome and so all methods exist within the game world, so they feel like a natural extension to it.

The problem seems that a lot of puzzle thinking is "how can insert this clever puzzle into the game and make it not so obvious it's being inserted?"

I say create the environments and the narrative PATH and then sit down and have each person on the team toss out what they think would be an interesting, challenging, or scary obstacle to deal with in that room/path/place and then sort through to find the best for each location and begin to brainstorm the details. Is it enough to have this particular stone walkway leading to a small wooden bridge over a stream just be a quiet spot, or should something happen? should the bridge collapse and force the player to find a way across the stream some other way. is there some reason stepping in the stream is inherently bad? (leechs? )

Some ideas will scream immediately as not fitting in the world. But I am betting some really good ideas will scream "perfect fit" as well. Some obstacles will seem appropriate, others may seem too forced. That will be to kick around and see how it messes with the pacing of the level, the frustration level it brings, and how often there are obstacles. To have so many obstacles that it takes hours to get through an area/nightmare and drag the story to a crawl is going to give tons of gameplay and a fairely LONG game.. but not for the right reasons.

I think that is why the 'light puzzles" from the coming storm worked: they were simple to follow and made sense within the game world without being obtuse, moon logic or out of place. I was impressed that a LOT of people doing let's play's of the game made the same mistake I did, in seeing the bloody cleaver in the kitchen, EVERYONE goes to try and grab it as it reminds them of the axe and it seems to be everyone's first instinct to grab a weapon when in a dangerous environment. The fact it was something you couldn't interact with, and so was counter to most players logic, was actually frustrating. In a lot of cases, even if you had no ability or skill to attack something/someone with a cleaver, you would still grab it just for the fact it has a reassuring aura being in your hand. To leave it just feels.. absurd.

That is also something to be mindful of. Players are going to want to utilize their environment to solve puzzles. if you have obvious objects that would work, but they are just "window dressing" and cannot be used, the player feels cheated and it makes no sense within the game. Just something to consider as you brainstorm and do level designs.

I don't mind injury and weakening the player if it feels natural and not forced. As well I prefer short terem injury so you don't spend the whole game grunting, crying, whining or screaming out in pain/discomfort. Realistic? no. Annoying if you keep going with it? YES.

Going for complete realism in games in many cases would spoil a lot of the charm people have gotten used to. We are programmed by television, movies and other media that some things, however inaccurate, are acceptable in entertainment. cars explode into giant fireballs. Gun shot wounds to the shoulder or arm bleed but can be ignored after a few minutes. Games perpetuate this and trying to science out the realism of a game is just going to be a no brainer - it wasn't MEANT to be 100% realistic, it was just something added for a given effect/to set a mood/to make a point/to alter the situation.

If you are going to apply injury to the player I would want it to be well thought out and have more of a purpose than " ok we broke your leg JUST so you can't climb those stairs.. haha ain't we clever!" . I want to see the player willingly act and get hurt as a consequence. Like choosing to try and save the life of someone about to get crushed by a falling tree, and in doing the noble thing, dislocate your shoulder and realize you dropped your only good lighter because you acted too quickly (a character that thinks with their heart and not their mind is very different than one who thinks only with pragmatism and lacks empathy or emotional connections). Make the injury have some thematic weight, both for the gameplay, for the character and for the mood/plot/story. If all of those details work together, it creates a really meaningful, natural and organic impairment that sucks to have, but the player never feels like it is being forced on them 'just because'.
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Grabthehoopka
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Re: 221 - Good puzzle design

Post by Grabthehoopka »

One of the things that I think worked so well with design of the light puzzles in the coming storm was that, judging from my own experience and that of watching let'splayers, when they came across the basement, or the boarded up doorway, they didn't seem to think "hmmm, how to get past this obstacle..." it was more like "well, I guess I can't go that way..." and moved on. Then, later, when they found the candle, and when they found the axe, their reaction seemed to universally be " *gasp*, I can use that!"

The satisfaction of puzzles comes from the "ah-ha!" moment when you figure it out, and with this, you got that "ah-ha!" with none of the difficulty in figuring it out.
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evilkinggumby
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Re: 221 - Good puzzle design

Post by evilkinggumby »

hmm.. I don't know if players perceiving the boarded up door or the dark basement as "dead ends" is a good thing. Essentially it means rather than seeing it as an obstacle, or even a locked door style puxxle, they just turn and forget about to and continue looking for a new path. Kind of like mindless roaming..hit a dead end, turn, find a different path. Thats.. not really a good thing except for massive maze type games (which this was not).

And the let's play's I saw didn't show this, but more of a pause, " how do i go past this" and then a willingness to carry on in hopes the answer comes to them. But I guess there are a lot of Let's players so it will depend on the crowd you like to follow.
The fact if you interacted with the boards, and could see there was something behind it, plus the fact you could vaguely see the dark basement had something there, made the players want to know more (which is good IMO).
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matt
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Re: 221 - Good puzzle design

Post by matt »

I definitely won't be doing "hard or clever" puzzles. I think I want to do more things like The Coming Storm, so I'm glad to hear that it felt like it worked. Calling them obstacles instead of puzzles doesn't mean anything different in my mind anyway. I guess they will be more "obstacles" than puzzles.

I think the main objective I have is to... give the game objectives! I think the structure of having a task and trying to solve it will make the game feel like you are accomplishing something rather than wandering aimlessly. Granted - I wanted the feel of wandering aimlessly in Neverending Nightmares, but I'd like to do something a bit different for the next one.

While I love the idea of multiple solutions, that requires new animations for every alternate solution, and I'm not sure that is the wisest usage of our development time since I'm not sure the MAIN focus will be on puzzles/obstacles/whatever. I think adding animations to make the enemy encounters really exciting/scary. We shall see how things go!
-Matt Gilgenbach
Lead Frightener at Infinitap Games
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