Blood to Ink, Workflow, and Puzzle Design
With the start of the new semester, I join my new Capstone team, Disco*Vision, to work on a murder-mystery narrative game, Blood to Ink. I joined this team as a puzzle designer to document, prototype and implement puzzles in the game. Besides just puzzle designing, I will also be helping with programming in anyway I can when I have time to outside of design work.
Puzzle Research
For the first sprint, I spent time watching Game Maker's Toolkit videos on puzzles and reading a book on making escape rooms. While the former was more helpful for Blood to Ink, there was still information to gleam from the escape room book. In particular, the book's tips on theming puzzles and objects was helpful to think about while brainstorming puzzles.
Back to Game Maker's Toolkit, the 3 videos I watched were Point and Click Adventure Games, Puzzle or Problem Solving, Jonathan Blow on Puzzle Design. Additionally, I read an article recommended on the Point and Click video. The most important notes I took from these was:
-Signposting (giving little subtle hints to the player) is very important for communicating the player's goals
-A puzzle is not just a puzzle, but a communication between designer and player
-End objective needs to be clear, and sub-goal should be obvious
Besides just researching puzzles, I also took a look into our game's current index of puzzles. Analyzing Blood to Ink
There currently two puzzles in the game. 1. Locked drawer and Key
-Player has to find a key that reveals a Alfred Glenn's (the victim in the murder mystery) will
-Signpost for this is a diagram, hidden under the desk of the locked drawer that shows where the key is in the fireplace 2. Lockbox and four-number code
-Player has to find a code that reveals strange pictures of Margot (victim's daugther)
-The signpost for this is a paper in the fireplace, which hints that there is a new lockbox number somewhere
-The player can find this by looking into certain books on the shelf, where one of the pages has a four-number code
The puzzles are simple, but work well for the environment and are fun to find. Since most of the demo is being scrapped, most of what I looked at here will guide the basics of exploration-type puzzles for me in the future.
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