I had a goal: Can I create a compelling narrative that include puzzles?

This is was not a percolating ambition of mine. Not at all. In fact, I wasn't even intending to enter the game jam because I am currently working on another project. However, there was a lull in the project and I thought to myself "Maybe I should enter the jam while waiting. I'll spend a week on it." 

One week turned into multiple weeks, but in the end, I am happy with my little game. 

This post will go into a bit of detail on my thoughts when creating Present Quest for Adventuron's Christmas Game Jam. 

"Know Your Audience"

This adage comes straight from Marketing 101, and something I always consider when I make any public puzzling experience.  It became one of my biggest problems.

Mainly because I needed to understand two audiences.

The first is the audience of the puzzle hunt / enthusiast community. I have a good idea of creating puzzles for them, and what they expect. I always tend to veer towards complicated puzzles, but lately, I have put considerable effort into designing accessible puzzles for the beginner puzzler.

The second audience is the adventure game community, of which I know nothing about. Even though I hold a nostalgic fascination towards text games, having played them as a child and teenager, I haven't involved myself in the IF community. 

What do they like? What do they expect? How would they feel about escape room puzzles within their text adventures? How much signposting is required? Will the puzzles I create be too jarring of an experience when immersed in the experience of an adventure game? 

The best way to answer these questions, obviously, is beta testing. However, although I had a number of wonderful beta testers from the puzzling community, I didn't have many from the adventure game community. I did watch Richard Hawkins youtube video which was wonderfully enlightening and helped me shape the first puzzle.  

My testing with the puzzle community was invaluable. Where the adventure game community may be unfamiliar with the puzzles, a few of the puzzle community found the concept of parser-based games foreign. (Some weren't even that familiar with computer games in general).

The number of updates for this game were not only to fix bugs, but to address the concerns brought up by both audiences (although mostly the puzzling audience). 

The UI Isn't a Puzzle

When creating puzzles, I have a set of guidelines I attempt to follow. For my players, I want them to have fun solving the puzzle, and not the 'lock'. Ever solve a puzzle in an escape room and as you enter the answer into a lock, you find the lock to be jammed or broken? This frustrates me to no end. I have the answer, just accept it already! 

Knowing the hurdle of a parser-based adventure game, the last thing I wanted my players to struggle with was the UI. Guess-the-verb roadblocks have always been a pet-peeve of mine, but is incredibly difficult to prevent. To make the game as accessible as possible to the puzzle community, I reduced the vocabulary to only a handful of verbs. In most cases, you could get by with only one word inputs.

I may have reduced it too much, though. In the end, some people were even asking what the point of the inventory was, and it's true. I don't even allow players to drop things. I still need to experiment more with this, because I do enjoy parser-based games, and I don't want to abandon it. 

I also worried the UI would be overwhelming. There's the gauges on the left, the picture in the middle, and the "map" on the right. The intro to the game was designed to introduce the players to the concept of the energy, mood, hunger, and work gauges. In fact, the work gauge was added in later to indicate that you need to work multiple times. You may have noticed the beginning animation of the energy rising is a slightly different HUD from the in-game HUD. False advertising! I had recreated that animation so many times I didn't want to do it anymore. :D

In regards to the tutorial, Chris, of Adventuron, helped me immensely with how the tutorial should refresh the screen. Refreshing the screen was one of my bigger problems, believe it or not. With so much text, and the large graphic at the top, I was struggling to find a way to present it all without it being overwhelming. 

One final thing I want to mention is my appreciation for colour coding. The first time I encountered this was when I was a teen playing an adventure game about a zombie on an island or swamp. It was utterly strange to me. I was a child of Infocom, and we were happy enough to have a status bar with reverse-coloured text, thank you very much. 

But now? As with guess-the-verb, I loathe iterating through multiple objects trying to find the one that garners enough importance to warrant an examine text, let alone a puzzle reveal. A lot of games guide you well, but I can see the appeal of TWO. :D

Hinting To Solution

I asked about this in the forum, "Do you offer solutions to your puzzles in the game?" As an old-timer, this was not a thing in the past. And I don't think it's a thing now in adventure games. 

However, it's a thing you find in escape room board games and table top games. Tammy Dorn, a designer from Haiku Games, was the first to ask me whether or not I would include solutions. When I first released it for beta testing, there were no solutions coded. However, after watching people struggle, I added solutions in after calling Pel a fourth time.

I want people to solve my games. I want people to get to the end. I changed a LOT of things in the first two puzzles, as alluded to in my Rabbit hole post, but I didn't want people to be indefinitely stuck. And the last puzzle isn't hard, but a lot of people found it intimidating. I broke mimesis a bit in that one to allow for hinting. And yes, I know that's not how ARP works, nor is there a CALL command. :D 

Puzzles and Mimesis

Speaking of mimesis, escape rooms have a problem of "escape room logic". There tends to be a lot of Solve the soup can tropes in escape rooms. For example, has the serial killer locked their microwave with a code that can only be derived by summing the shoe sizes of their past victims? This seems to be an impractical way to warm up your lunch. Adventure games tend to be less ridiculous. 

Did you know there are academic papers on these things? Scott Nicholson has written a paper called Ask Why to attempt to make sense of puzzles within an escape room. 

Personally, I'm happy with how the puzzles fit the narrative, and shocked it worked, because it came about organically. I saw in the game jam requirements "four puzzles", and the first one was "created" by Pel. In the end, I made all the puzzles created by Pel and it fit the narrative nicely.

Compelling Characters - Will you Care?

Story is not a huge priority for many escape room designers. People are there to win, and the added complication of a time limit is detrimental to developing any type of attachment to the narrative. 

I am the worst when it comes to story in a video game. Narrative designers would hate me because all I want to do is skip dialogue. "Blah blah blah, you have feelings, great. LET ME SKIP THIS!" 

Thus, it is a bit ironic that my goal was to create a compelling narrative with integrated puzzles. I hope I used the correct definition of ironic. That's always a difficult one for me. 

For me, a story in a game needs people I find interesting. That's how I get drawn in. So I wanted to create compelling characters. I wanted to create characters the player would like. 

I didn't expect people to like Gord. In fact, I was expecting people to tell me to remove him because he really served no purpose in the game.

And some people didn't like him at all. However, other people loved Gord! They read through ALL his dialogue. That's a lot of dialogue. I didn't even fully spell check because I didn't expect people to read through it.

Bert's character isn't fully realized. I didn't get a chance to portray him correctly. He was supposed to be more of an oppressive jerk. He is, actually, an oppressive jerk, but it doesn't come across until near the end. I should have fixed that. 

And Pel? I like Pel. I hoped other people liked Pel. I always create a Pel-like character in most of my work, just because she's fun to write. 

Reception - Did They Care?

Some did. And that made me happy. I received some wonderful comments:

"The puzzles as a whole were very fun to figure out, but the story was definitely what stood out and left that impact."
- Sherry S.

"I liked it a great deal and will remember it for a long time, both from a personal experience perspective and also from a design perspective."
- Dan E.

"I had literal goose bumps..."
- Jon K.

"I'm still amazed at the design of the game and how you put it together"
- David L.

"That game was amazing. Silly, fun, deep and emotional. Story, story ,story!! Bravo"
- Richard B.

"Holy crap @Errol, that was beautiful."
- Codiak

I created a Discord server for beta testers, and for people to vent about the game. It was most helpful for me, and encouraging.

Conclusion - Beta Testing is Pivotal

There are a lot of things I would still do to this game had I more time. More tweaks. More graphics. But in the end, I was happy about my first adventure game, and game jam!

My beta testers, as listed in the game and in the credits, were PIVOTAL for this game, and I cannot thank them enough. I know the point of the jam is to get something out, but as someone who doesn't get a chance to beta test much due to the nature of my other games (competitive), having the time to get and implement feedback was so refreshing.

There was a lot I learned during that beta testing, and even a tiny bit of controversy, which I hope to bring up in a later post! Drama!!

Thanks to all of my testers, thank you to those who took the time to play my game, and a thank you to you, dear reader, for making it this far. Gord could talk as much as he did for a reason...and that reason is me.