Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Many Types of Puzzles but Only One Type of Brain? (Part 2)

(The following is a continuation of this article)
Why then, if seeking knowledge by inductive reasoning takes so long compared to deductive reasoning and heightens the risk of damaging oneself and/or one's surroundings would anyone even attempt it?

Many Types of Puzzles but Only One Type of Brain? (Part 1)

As I finish up the playalysis (play + analysis) of Fez for my Indy Hobo series I have one powerfully lingering thought:  There are so many different types of puzzles in video games; are they all interacting and stimulating only one type of brain?

Sunday, December 7, 2014

Toki Tori 2+ is NOT a metroidvania!!!!!!

Toki Tori 2+ is NOT a game that belongs to the metroidvania genre.  It is a game that shares certain elements similar to metroid and some castlevania games, but they do not share the same genre.  It is similar to how metroid and castlevania share certain elements with super mario brothers, yet no one in their right mind would put the three games in the same genre.  

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

S:S&S = Superbrothers: Sexual & Satisfying

Did this game



Cause this 


to you?


It didn't for me and here is why.  I don't use twitter and this game's nudgings to do so weren't strong enough.  

The game Swuperbwothers: Sword and Sworcery had a unique take on marketing by having a built in node one could tap to automatically tweet whatever was happening in the game to their twitter account.  To me it was more of a nuisance than anything else because I didn't care whether people knew I was playing the game or not.  Had there been a moment when I wanted everyone to know then it would have been another story....but apparently there wasn't. 

Aside from the lackluster attempt to get me to advertise for them, the developers behind S:S&S did deliver in one promise they made at the beginning of the game: good sound and jazzy music.  This Jim Guthrie fellow made some solid tunes throughout the game.  Particularly I liked the tunes the flowed After each I defeated and retrieved each Trigon, while I was in the dream world during a full moon, and when the Gogolithic Mass chased me.

The one aspect I was trying to explore while playing the game was the insatiable curiosity I had about how the entire dialog of the game reminded me of something a schmo would say while hanging with his other friend schmo.  There were modern colloquialisms, filler words, and then suddenly words that fit the context of the game.  After thinking about this for awhile I developed in my mind a voice that I imagined would speak this way in real life.  I imagined this voice would belong to someone who liked groups like Ben Folds Five, but also would watch episodes of Sesame Street simply because few people his age would do it.  A voice that grew up in the 90's with a tinge of modern hipster.  And then I heard this.  

ALL MY ASSUMPTIONS WERE VALIDATED!

That point aside, I also wondered if most artistic games share characteristics similar to conventional art in that if they reflect the personality of the designer then they will be much more popular (of course among people who find that personality type amiable). 

In the name of Buddha, Amen.

Friday, October 3, 2014

Unmechanical is not a word


But environmental is.  And this is exactly what the game designers for Unmechanical did unbelievably right with how they designed their puzzles.  I have been developing this theory about puzzles in games as having a line dividing them: on the one side are inductive puzzles (puzzles that implicitly communicate their parameters to the player via the environment and leave the player to discover the solution) and deductive puzzles (puzzles that explicitly communicate to the player the rules that govern the parameters of the puzzle and leave the player to deduce the solution).  Now why did I use the word discover with inductive puzzles yet deduce with deductive puzzles?  Could I have used induce instead of discover?  Yes I could have.  Should have I?  No.  Why?  Because discover is much more engaging of a word.  That is exactly the attitude you need when attempting to solve inductive puzzles.  You need to engage every....... single...... goddamn...... object......... because sometimes you never know which one will lead to the solution.  Now I must admit that this strategy is used predominately in adventure games with what I call pixel treasure hunt.  But Unmechanical did an "amazing" job at implicitly communicating the expectations of its puzzles using solely elements from the game.  (If it weren't for this puzzle I would be able to take that amazing out of the parenthesis but leaving the player to figure out how to solve a puzzle can have some backdraft if not properly designed into the environment, as I will now address.)

The only issue I have seen with the inductive form of puzzle design is that heavy reliance on the environment to communicate the parameters of a puzzle means the designers have to heavily rely on solid environmental design.  It is very easy to make mistakes here simply because humans are not accustomed to this form of communication.  Imagine this: You need to tell your GF that you are going to be late from work.  You can either call her and tell her directly (deductive) or devise a way for her to figure it out as she interacts with her environment (inductive).  The latter is MUCH MUCH MUCH more enjoyable from a game design point of view...IF DONE CORRECTLY!!!!!  However, nothing is more frustrating than knowing the game wants you to do something before progression in the story in allowed yet having no clue what to do.

In the end though, I applaud the design team behind Unmechanical for taking the inductive route of puzzle design simply because I don't see it often.  Don't get me wrong, both forms of puzzles are wonderfully fun in their own right but too many developers take the easy route of writing a story for a game, then jerking the gamer out of that story every time a puzzle is introduced to explain the rules behind it.  The rule of thumb I would have towards whether a game should have inductive vs deductive puzzles would be - respect the gamer's expectations.  If you have inductive puzzles put every single drop of design juice into the environment to ensure that the gamer is communicated clearly what is expected of him to solve the puzzle without ever being jerked from the story.  If you have deductive puzzles then take advantage of them by making puzzles with interesting rules that require back door logic, or crossword thinking to solve.  DO NOT make a game that doesn't know what it is because the gamer will immediately know it and hate you forever for it.

Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Indy Hobo Playalyzed: Broken Sword II - The Smoking Mirror

The following article is the follow-up synopsis of everything I learned about the design behind P&C adventure games while playing and analyzing the game Broken Sword II - The Smoking Mirror.  (To see the web series where I played and analyzed the game, please click here)

A theme that kept jumping out to me while I played Broken Sword II - The Smoking Mirror was how items and dialog were used to communicate it's story-line.  I noticed that the progression of the story was often at the whim of the proper usage of a certain item or a dialog with a NPC (non-playable character).  Since the success of a P&C adventure game relies mostly on a well delivered story, it seemed well meritorious to further explore their relationships with these two elements.

After what accrued to be an unnecessary amount of analysis I came to a conclusion that would have eluded the foresight of even the most powerful of wizards.   I concluded that there are two types of point and click adventure games: P&C games with inductive game play and P&C games with deductive game play.  I know, inductive and deductive are words never before with P&C games, but there is reason for this trespass.  I came to use these terms partly because they are very prevalent in my studies (I'm taking some courses on research), partly because I am trying to marry my skills as a designer of educational material with my skills as a designer of entertainment material, but mostly because they fit each other in the most eerie of ways.  I will first give context to these words outside of games, and then show how I connected them to P&C games.

Inductive and deductive are words most typically used with how humans use reason to acquire knowledge.  To reason inductively is to take a number of experiences with a topic, find a common theme among them, and draw a generalization about the topic from this theme.  For example - I have dated 5 women between the ages of 20 and 30.  Once a month all five of these women would have a menstrual related experience.  I inductively reason from these experiences that all women between these ages share similar menstrual experiences.  Deductive reasoning, on the other hand, is the complete opposite.  To continue with the previous example - With little to no personal experience I deduce that the woman I am dating will have a menstrual related experience at least once a month simply by that fact it is widely considered true that she will.  Inductive reasoning relies on the individual drawing heavily from personal experiences to define the parameters of a situation while deductive reasoning relies on the individual drawing heavily from outside experiences to define the parameters of a situation.

Now how does this translate into P&C games?  To help the reader understand that I will take elements that all P&C adventure games share and show how they differ under the inductive/deductive microscope.  I will use the keywords personal and outside experience from above throughout this article to help with this differentiation.  Hopefully you will notice patterns of how the shared elements of the game change as they go from one side of the spectrum to the other.

Puzzles


Puzzles are a very defining characteristic of P&C games.  Some puzzles are just refurbished versions of classics like this puzzle from A Whispered World:

 
But what if you need to find a detonator so you can blow your friend out of jail?  Or find some ingredients for a potion that will cure your hand of a disease that causes it to randomly punch you in the face at the most inopportune moments?  These puzzles resemble more of a laundry list then anything else.  But within the confines of a P&C adventure game they are all considered puzzles.  In P&C games a puzzle is defined as anything that stands in the way between you and the progression of the story.  Their varied shapes, however, do start to make more sense under the lens of our inductive/deductive microscope.  Remember that inductive reasoning uses personal experience to draw meaning and therefore is used when the parameters of a situation are unknown and all the player can use IS his personal experience to solve a puzzle.  If you are playing a P&C adventure game and you often find yourself running around trying to find items, or using random items with other random items with the hope they fit together, or just often ask yourself, "What the hell am I supposed to do?", it means you are playing trying to solve a puzzle within a situation that has not been clearly communicated to you.  You need to use the various experiences you have of interacting with items, the environment, and NPCs, within that situation to induce what the solution to the puzzle would be.  You are playing an inductive P&C adventure game.  An example of this would be if the game communicated to you via an NPC that you need to fix the windmill so that you can provide power to the cottage and survive the cold winter.  After this point you receive no other pointers from the game.  It is up to you, the various experiences you have with your environment, the items you have in your backpack, and your ingenious ability to make the right connections (or use a walk through) to solve the puzzle.  You can adjust the difficulty settings of the game to allow for explicit hints to be given but that is not considered part of the story design so it is irrelevant to this article. (I am however experimenting with how to have a difficulty setting be an integral part of the story design.....still need to write an article on that though)  A deductive game design approach would mean you rely solely on what is communicated to you by the game to solve the puzzle - outside experience dictating what you do.  Now if this approach was used to design the windmill puzzle I just used that would be a very boring puzzle.  The game would not only tell you that you need to turn the windmill on, but tell you each step in the process.  There would effectively be NO puzzle!

So what does a puzzle in a deductive P&C game look like?  Well you just need to think of a puzzle that has clearly defined parameters or, in this case, rules.  If you refer back to the picture above you will notice some writing on the top left.  That is the outside experience a person used to design the puzzle being communicated in the form of rules of how to solve the puzzle.  The player who wants to solve that kind of puzzle CAN'T use personal experience to solve it because he has none.  If he did, he would already know the solution!  Puzzles in deductive P&C games therefore tend to take the shape of mini games with well defined rules that have been purposely designed to be exceptionally hard to solve within those set rules.  Puzzles like these didn't exist in traditional P&C adventure games like Monkey Island, but games like Puzzle Agent have changed this.  Why you may ask?  Well, puzzles in inductive P&C games don't lend themselves well to numbers and stats.  I mean how do you place a numerical value on turning on a windmill?  You either do it and live, or don't and die.  On one hand deductive P&C games gained popularity because screens like this:


are crack to some gamers.


Now some of you may be telling yourself, "Well, I don't care if I get 10 stars for solving a puzzle on my first try.  There is no emotional weight there.  I would feel much more motivated to solve a puzzle of turning on a windmill because I know otherwise I could die!".  And this very thought beings me to the next element shared by both inductive and deductive P&C games.....

Story

The desire for a well designed and delivered story is the reason P&C adventure games came into existence.  The whacky characters of Space Quest, the dark comedy of the Grim Fandango, are all memorable because of our innate attraction to a good story.  This was the birth the birth of the P&C adventure game genre though it is not is sole state today.  Since the days of Monkey Island, P&C adventure games have undergone various makeovers.  For the purpose of this article I will stay within the confines of inductive and deductive games (although if you have played Gemini Rue, you will have seen elements of action start to creep into the genre and I have no clue how that fits into my inductive/deductive model)

Since inductive P&C games rely much more heavily on how the player interprets his own personal experiences with other characters, the environment, etc, it requires the player to get more emotionally involved with the story - of course, the answers to the puzzles are communicated VIA the story!  This thus puts great responsibility on the designer to assure the most engaging story is produced and delivered in the most engaging way.  Failure to do so would undoubtedly result in a bored gamer.  Deductive P&C games, with their emphasis on incredibly challenging mini games the solution of which is generally detached from the story line altogether, are more geared towards gamers who like well-defined rules wherein they must obey in order to prosper.  These gamers would also enjoy games from the puzzle genre as well.  This means there is not as much of an emphasis on developing an interesting story because the gamer is, after all, just waiting for the next opportunity to score a perfect 0, get those 10 stars, all the while having insane stimulation to his cognitive brain muscle.  Thus, games on the inductive extreme would have very complex and elaborate story lines where the player is pitted against himself in inducing the solution to all the pitfalls that await him while on the deductive extreme the player is less concerned with how the story unfolds and more concerned with how mentally challenging the puzzles are.

There are, of course, few games that fall on any of these extremes.  Most P&C games these days fall somewhere in between.  This is OK - sometimes.  Sometimes what happens is you get a game that doesn't know what it is.  It tries to be inductive when it should be deductive and vice versa.  This is the reason I went to such depths to try to define these two types of games from the same genre.  As a person who wants to one day design my own P&C adventure (and as a teacher who thinks these games are the missing link to make edugames actually fun games) I felt I needed to properly define the various types of P&C games I have played so I could understand what they did right and where they could have improve.  For example, at the very end of Broken Sword II - The Smoking Mirror there was a puzzle designed typically for a deductive P&C game - but Broken Sword II - The Smoking Mirror was clearly an inductive P&C game.  This isn't to say it was wrong to include a deductive-type P&C puzzle in an inductive game, if the puzzle was properly designed.  What I had to endure was a puzzle that took 15 seconds to solve, but 5 minutes to complete.  It was long, boring, and horribly designed.  I think this could have been avoided if the designers clearly knew the difference between inductive and deductive P&C games and designed accordingly.  That is what I plan on doing.

There are still many more aspects of P&C games I need to understand.  My deductive/inductive model may eventually lack the integrity to hold up under the pressure of all the other elements I am still to discover.  Who knows.  I am not THAT I love with it.  I will continue to play these games, continue to analyze them, and most importantly continue to design my own.

Thursday, July 24, 2014

Indy Hobo's Game Design Thoughts Thus Far

I have been doing a vlog on game design for the past month where I take on the persona Indy Hobo and play games all the while analyzing them from my sprouting game design mind.  If you have not seen it click here.(please ignore all the other randomly unrelated stuff on my you tube channel.....wait...please DON'T ignore it.  I command you to watch that stuff too!!!)

In this post I would like to make a summary of what I have learned from this vlog, and from all the other activities I participate in concerning game design.

Point and click adventure games

P&C adventure games are unique from most other games in that they don't follow all the game design elements that most games typically follow.  Since P&C games are 100% story driven with the occasional puzzle, the rules that apply are ones that promote proper story telling.  Here is what I have picked up so far.


  • All events in the game must be coherent with the overall theme of the story.  I wish I didn't have to mention this but I have noticed that some designers let there P&C game become too "gamey" and it gets in the way of the story.  What is let over is a lackluster story inside a lackluster game.  Designers of P&C games....please stick to the story.  If you want a mechanic driven game then make a mechanic driven game, don't try to cram your story into it.  please read this for more elaboration on this point.
  • Since P&C games are very light with the mechanics they naturally lend themselves to puzzles - which are easy to implement because they don't require any elaborate designs.  Just plug in and play - like a mini game.  The only issue is when the puzzle once again has nothing to do with the story or the solution to the puzzle is completely detached from the reality within the story. 
  • If the puzzle in the P&C game is one of those story driven puzzles where you need to use some sort of item found within the game on some other item, or give the item to a NPC, or bash the item over your head - cause a coma - and find out the solution was within your heart all along; THERE MUST BE CLEAR COMMUNICATION from the game designer to the player as to what the parameters are to solve the puzzle.  This communication occurs via 2 and only 2 things: dialog between characters in the game, and logical relationships between in-game items.  A logical relationship between in-game items is NOT "player must take the piece of paper, place it in a pile of wet leaves and start it on fire".  With only 2 forms of communication available there should never be a point where a player is left asking, "WTF am I SUPPOSED TO DO!!!!!!"  If this is the case, we have a case of possible good game designer, horrible story teller.
  • I am convinced that the requirements for a good solid fun P&C game, one doesn't need to be well versed in the complex relationships of various game mechanics but only need be a good story teller.
Puzzle games

The debate will never end as to whether or not Puzzle games are actually games but I don't care.  If you can sell it on a platform with other "games"...its a goddamn game.

  • Puzzle games need to be designed like you would help a baby up some stairs.  you would never show the baby the stairs, run up them, and wait for the baby to follow.  Similarly, you should never show the player how to play your puzzle game, then disappear as the player tries to internalize all the information alone.  It is the job of the designer of puzzle  games to organize the levels in a way that the levels themselves SHOW the player how to play the game..step by step.  The designer communicates to the player all the expectations of the game VIA the levels themselves.
  • There seems to be many ways to add difficulty to a puzzle game.  One way I learned from the game KAMI is by dedicating about 3-4 levels to train the players brain to think a certain way to solve a puzzle and then following those levels have a "curve-ball" level.  This curve-ball level will appear to be solved using the same logic that has been ingrained in the players brain, but it isn't.  This will require the player to take a step back and reassess the puzzle with a clear mind.  This process is difficult for some people but once done is incredibly gratifying. 
Below is a picture from the game KAMI that illustrates this idea.  




The four problems circled in the picture are the priming problems.  They prime the mind to think a certain way.  In this example they are communicating to the player to focus on the white dots for the solution.  Then the player runs into the curve-ball problem and thinks he should focus on the white dot but soon realizes there is no possible solution that way.

  • The solution to any problem must only use techniques that the player is aware of and feels comfortable using.  This means that the techniques must have been properly communicated to the player prior to the current problem.  The difficulty of a problem then rests not on some cryptic discovery but by simply using what is already known and comfortable to the player in a way not yet experienced by the player.  To use the picture above again.  The idea of focusing on one spot to find the solution is used with every problem circled.  Only that the solution to the curve-ball problem is to not focus on the white spots but to focus on the red spot that connects the two red lines.  Same idea - different point of view.

As I learn more, I will continue to update this blog with my discoveries.  Good night/day/later.

nine'O'three