Final puzzles: How do you end a point & click adventure game?

hi and welcome back to the point-and-click devlog an ongoing series in which closely inspecting everything you can see is quite often the only true way to success today i'm going to talk about endings specifically how the hell do you end a point-and-click adventure [Music] game so i've had to do some rethinking in the last little bit in my quest to draw all of the backdrops ever i've now closed in on the last few rooms in the game and swiftly came a bit unstuck when deciding exactly what should go in them and this is my fault when i first set up my big overarching puzzle dependency chart i think i rushed the ending i just put a real simple puzzle in there as the last major thing you do one that i deem to be fine or adequate and then put that process to bed and move swiftly onto drawing so i've now hit a roadblock where i can't draw those final rooms until i rethink those final puzzles and it spurred me to think about final puzzles or at least the puzzles of the end game of point-and-click adventure games as a whole because i think they're a tricky thing to get right the thing about point-and-click games and i think part of the reason people like them is that they're quite stress-free environments right they're quite cozy and slow paced and comforting which is something that conflicts quite harshly with traditional thinking around how a game should end in most game genres the end of the game is where the tension the action and the pace ramp up to their natural zenith you've got the biggest boss the toughest platforming challenge or the hardest race the end of most games will leave your controller sweaty and your heart pounding which makes perfect sense for an awful lot of titles but how do you carry over that sense of urgency into a point-and-click adventure well maybe you just shouldn't in researching this video i took to twitter the adventure gamers forum and this channel's own discord server and asks what people thought were the worst final puzzles or segments from point-and-click games old and new i've got a host of responses but a couple of comments really hit the nail on the head like this one from forum user viovis it seems like many developers think it's good game design to throw a very hard borderline unsolvable puzzle or action segment at the player near the end of their games maybe the rationale behind such thinking is that the player may not want the game to end or may feel that it was too short without spending hours on solving a difficult puzzle or managing a timed action sequence talk about counterproductive thinking i hate that kind of game design fellow forum user tomimt says the problem with puzzles is that it's pretty hard to make them feel climactic they aren't by nature similar to end boss fights that you can ramp up in order to make them feel more epic and all the other responses uniformly cited two types of bad final puzzle timed sequences and mazes ah time sequences these obviously aim to emulate the tension found in other gaming genres but i don't think you should really try and do that in an adventure game i don't play these games to get an adrenaline rush so the idea that everything should suddenly turn frantic to try and force that feeling of finality usually makes things feel totally awkward that's not to say that games don't attempt this though because lots of them do even great games suffer from bad final segments and urgency manifesting as timed events is often the culprit i recently replayed gemiini room a great adventure game by wodgetai games and even i have to admit that my enjoyment of it dipped slightly towards the end when things devolved into an endless series of shootouts that need precision timing and that reload a long way back when you fail it's just not what i and i think other players are looking for when they choose this kind of game the other kind of end game puzzle that seems to grind everyone's gears is the dreaded maze these often aren't the very final puzzle in the game but you do see mazes pop up in everything from monkey island 1 to well monkey island 2 there's a way of presenting a really hard puzzle that blocks the player from breathing through and i'll tell you something i hate them i'm not sure anyone likes them in fact a maze in an adventure game is just a frustration in the shape of a puzzle and i vow never to put one in any game i make as a result but it's funny developers must know that players don't like these things they must know that timed sequences and mazes aren't fan favorites and yet they keep cropping up as serious staples is that just because they're exactly that staples or is it because they seem to be the only way to ramp up towards a climax and more importantly is there a more elegant way to do things well if urgency isn't the answer and you know nor are mazes then what's left in terms of making something feel final what works that's what i've been thinking about and i've come to the conclusion that the most important thing is to provide a sense of accomplishment to me there are two possible ways to go about this the first is just to present the player with a really difficult puzzle but that alone can run the risk of being obtuse for the sake of obtuseness and also by the end game do you really want the puzzles to get infinitely hard as viovis put it on my adventure gamers forum post i think a game's difficulty curve at least in story driven games should peak somewhere around the middle or three quarters into the game that far into a game i usually want to focus more on the story instead of dealing with ever more difficult puzzles this reminds me of indie dying platformer celeste in which the difficulty ramps up to crazy heights near the end before presenting you with a relatively straightforward final level and the reason is simple you know letting you revel in how good you've become at the game is much more satisfying than squaring off against even more challenge so if the first method of bringing about that sense of accomplishment is just to be difficult the second as i see it is to use some element of repetition to test the player's memory repetitious elements in games films books whatever you like they reward observant participants and they nicely bookend proceedings with a kind of cyclical nature i think monkey island 2 actually does this quite well in the final rooms of that game you figure out you need to make a rudimentary version of the voodoo doll from act 1. in act 1 you need to collect something of the thread something of the head something of the body something of the dead that's a bra a toupee some spit and a bone and at the end of the game you have to collect similar things but it's different objects collected through different means it's cyclical and rewards your memory rather than being overly obtuse that's not to say that monkey island 2 isn't without obtuse puzzles and not to mention the fact that that whole ending section does have a timed element to it but this particular puzzle is elegant in terms of the qualifiers we've already laid out so with that all said what am i going to do with my game basically steal that formula i think my original puzzle the one that i hastily came up with just so i could put an end to my planning was rubbish so rubbish that i'm not even going to mention it here so i've scrapped that and created a mini quest across a few rooms that more or less recreates one from a big part of the earlier game will it be perfect probably not but i can tell you this it will be better than having the player need to do something against the clock and it will be better than a maze anyway that's pretty much it for me for another episode except for the next few seconds in which i die a little inside and explicitly ask you if you might consider subscribing so according to my channel analytics some 70 of the viewers here aren't actually subscribed that either means the content really is or that new viewers just can't be bothered to subscribe and if the latter sounds like you fair enough i've been there but i promise you this if you do click that subscribe button now i'll try my level best to make it worth your while once again we do also have a discord server for the channel because that's a thing people do now it's a burgeoning little club full of fellow point-and-click developers and it's a good source for mutual support there's also now a point-and-click devlog twitter account too because i figured that'll be a good place to share some screenshots and work in progress assets i've put a link to both of those in the description below and i hope to see you there if not no worries i will see you in the next one bye you

Channel: The Point & Click Devlog

Views: 1,903

Keywords: Point and click, adventure game devlog, devlog, point and click devlog, visionaire studio, adventure game studio, ags, adventure creator, point and click adventure, make an adventure game, pixaki, adventure games, point and click adventure games, game art, trello, indie games, indie developer, gamedev, game development, solo developer, solo dev

Id: ZeYl7O-VHwU

Length: 9min 39sec (579 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 27 2020