Puzzle design: How to design point and click adventure game puzzles

hello and welcome back to the point-and-click dev vlog an ongoing series in which we're combining persistence with efforts and using it on every object in the room this week we're going to be taking a look at the anatomy of a point and click game puzzle and using that to figure out how best to design our own we've got a lot to cover off so without further ado here we go so I've had a fair bit of interest in my process for designing and mapping out puzzles as discussed in episode 1 this devlog so I thought I'd take this video to dive a little deeper into the structure of pointer click puzzles how they work what similarities funke through them and ultimately how to make your own I just want to say right at the top that mark brown also has an excellent video on this subject which I've linked in the description that you should definitely watch when you're done here but while there is some healthy crossover between his video and this one I'm going to take this in a slightly different direction in the back half by focusing on d-pad Matic so building on your own puzzles rather than all the ways to help avoid so called immune logic so as mentioned previously I have most of my own games puzzles nailed down now mapped out across two documents that's my overall game design dot and this monster flowchart made using usage chart the main structure for these came off the back of research into what the industry commonly calls puzzle dependency charts as a quick reminder this is a graph made by starting at the end of each puzzle or group of puzzles namely your character's goal and working backwards adding complications and requirements to complete each puzzle that's kind of the how but before we get into that properly we also need to look at the watt namely what the puzzles in these games are actually about on their most basic level to that end I did some digging to see what people much smarter than me who said on the subjects at hand I found this great block by size of five games dan Marshall from 2014 about the three main building blocks of point-and-click puzzles doors keys and signposts by the nature of the beast as a door dan says a blockage something is stopping the player getting from A to B doors are by and large pretty dull the good news is the door is just a metaphor for obstruction they can be anything and the obstruction doesn't have to be literal a fire and maniac with an axe and anthropomorphize pair of shoes with a bad attitude and just as your door can be anything like a fire for example your key can be as crazy as you like to water and bucket are boring items dan explains you can do anything in adventure games so let's make them more interesting if it's a thing I can get my hands on in real life it often makes sense to change it for something more outlandish and interesting what's better than water piss it's more interesting than a bucket a hollowed-out owl carcass let's go with those use our coffers filled with piss on fire now that's a puzzle solution and that's great especially if you're making a wacky day of the tentacle of style game but given that it's not an immediately obvious common-sense solution the last part of the pie signposting becomes just as important as anything else in other words have your character say things and move in such a ways to point the player in the right direction your elephant needs to be animated in a way that looks like he's queueing for the toilet legs crossed sweating if you look at him the character needs to say something along the lines of ma'am that elephant needs a piss if I could capture it somehow I have a bountiful supply of water like liquid so I post everything and as long as the puzzle makes sense within the batshit-crazy context of your game world it's all gravy of course if your game set in a more down-to-earth environment sometimes using water on fire is fine so long as there's still some kind of puzzling to be done and that realisation got me thinking about how most point and click games open because while the door and key metaphor runs true for most of these games a lot of them quite literally beginning with you trapped in a room needing to open a door and it's obvious why when you think about it that a single room opening structure acts as a simple enclosed space to help teach the player the ropes without becoming overwhelmed you get to learn about picking up objects combining them and using them ultimately to unlock that door and before you then let your doors and keys become wildly more metaphorical in nature this setup helps keep things nice and simple we're all familiar with locked doors we all know they want opening let's look at example the opening of Broken Sword to seize our hero George dobar tied up in a room with a huge spider and a fire in front of the only exit killing the spider untying yourself and putting out the fire with a three metaphorical keys you need to unlock the literal door so how's it done in brief examine the bookshelf to learn that it's being supported by a brick kick the brick in the bookshelf takes care of the spider that also reveals a bit of metal you can use to free yourself you're effectively learning a few key things here one that you can learn more about objects by inspecting them too is that characters George in this example will signpost new and useful information and three how to physically interact with objects in the room from there we examine in which few items to gain new ones pick up a few objects use them to gain access to cabinets and other objects and finally combine two items a water slide from Macalester to create a makeshift fire extinguisher and that's job done it's a tight little sequence that acts as a perfect tutorial and vertical slice for you'll be doing in the rest of the game and because of that I think we should have a go at deconstructing it I only use this opening to show what I mean when I say a puzzle dependency chart and how they naturally build out from the solution backwards so let's open up trusty old lucid chart and have a go at doing just that so first up let's use some kind of color coding system to keep ourselves focused I'm going to use white blocks for general actions yellow if objects orange for combined objects black for our end goal gray for scene setup and blue for our sub goals I'm going to put two blocks in first the scene set up and the end goal ultimately we need to escape the room but our sub goals help us get there kill the spider untie yourself and fire so let's put those in first now I know I said we'd work from the end backwards but because this scene starts the linear and ends up more complex I'm just going to handle those two initial sub goals first how do we kill the spider how about kicking that support block that's too simple as is though so how about we need to inspect it first that's adding the complexity in an option same applies for freeing yourself use the metal handle but only after you've inspected it okay so now we have this gulf between George being untied and putting out that fire and we need some puzzle gameplay ideally more complex puzzle gameplay to fill it with so let's move backwards if we're revolution of software we decide that we want to use a water safe on that fire but we don't want it to be readily available so let's make that a combined object from two separate parts the siphon itself and a working gas cylinder and to keep this opening a bit streamlined let me one of those things readily available so in this case the siphon can be picked up as soon as you're untied okay now let's get making the intact cylinder more complex by requiring two puzzle parts to get it firstly let's put it in a locked cabinet we need something sharp to Jimmy open so how about the blow dart for the opening sequence get that he used on the cabinet opens we still don't want things to be that straightforward though in this case revolution decided that opening the cabinet would break one cylinder causing an explosion do it wink the remaining one too hot to touch so we need to pick it up with some kind of protective material this is the 90s so hey why not some of Niko's sexy underwear so let's make use that on cylinder our action we want one more complexity in there though so let's make getting the underwear also teach the player that inspecting immaterial items can be tuned brand new items so let's put them in her bag and make inspect bag that action now if we hook those all up here you can see that from the point of being untied you effectively have three different parts go down that combine to solve the larger sub goal each one starting with a readily available object you can pick up the bag the darts and the siphon but the two former objects eventually serve the same mini puzzle so there you go that's one puzzle dependency charm and a great one for opening a game with because it's fairly linear while still running through the basics disclaimer there are actually a few more objects to collect in that room that you'll need for the next one but I figure it was best to keep things simple for the purpose of this video as your game opens up and becomes more complex you might want to add more and more code appendices that means common items that serve more than one puzzle or I use the cross ax or a larger overarching goal that a nice lots of smaller puzzles to solve it first anyway I think that was a useful little experiment for anyone embarking on is joining themselves and I hope it provided some good food for thought as I've mentioned before none of this is my invention it's how the very best in the industry created the flow for their point-and-click adventures which is why is the structure I've used to help me create three hopefully robust acts for mine beyond that I think having everything mapped out like this allows you to see at a glance all your items and combined items if you that overall complexity and pacing and that's the whole thing acts as a kind of walkthrough for your game which to me makes this a pretty invaluable practice anyway that's me for another episode so thanks for watching I'm still cracking on with Detroit backdrops for my own games so I'm gonna get back to that now let me know how you're getting on with your projects or what you're playing in the comments and I will see you in the next one bye

Channel: The Point & Click Devlog

Views: 4,152

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Point and click, point and click game, point n click, point and click adventure game, puzzle design, gmtk, visionaire studio, devlog, point and click devlog, gamemaker’s toolkit, mark brown, point and click puzzle design, adventure game puzzle design, game puzzle design, designing puzzles, broken sword, revolution software, indie gaming, gamedev, indie gamedev, game devlog, game development, Puzzle dependency chart

Id: xlQSA9TIS-Q

Length: 11min 25sec (685 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 04 2020