Things to Do in Acts 1 to 3

May 3, 2019

With the critical path of Act 3 of Sleuthhounds: Cruise complete I’ve taken some time to compare the first three acts in terms of the tasks that must/may be done to complete them. Each act has its own characteristics and it’s interesting to look at them side by side to get an understanding of the journeys of Jane Ampson and Pureluck Homes through the game.

Dependency charts of Acts 1, 2, and 3.

Above are the puzzle dependency charts for each of the first three acts. These charts are a simple design tool used to depict each step that a player has to complete along the way. They’re useful for seeing how linear or how layered a game is at different points. As Cruise also features two main playable characters, the charts are also a good way to roughly judge how much play time each individual character has.

Within the charts there are three main types of nodes. Blue nodes represent actions that only Pureluck Home can do. Purple ones represent actions that only Jane Ampson can do. And dark grey ones represent actions that either character can do. Occasionally other colours pop up as well. These tend to be for key plot moments in each act and are notes for myself as opposed to actual steps players have to perform.

Before getting into what the layout of each act means, here’s a quick breakdown of the nodes in each act:

Act	Blue (Homes)	Purple (Ampson)	Grey (both)	Other	Total
1	29	33	0	1	63
2	27	25	114	23	189
3	97	78	11	10	196

Act 1

From the comparison table we can see that Act 1 is quite a bit smaller than Acts 2 and 3, coming in at roughly a third of the size. This was quite intentional as I wanted Act 1 to be a straightforward introduction to how the game is played and to who the main characters are.

When we look at the puzzle dependency chart for Act 1, it starts on the left and ends on the right,as all the charts do. The chart shows distinct blue and purple sections along the way, indicating that the game switches back and forth between Homes and Ampson. Areas where the nodes spread out vertically are places where the player has a choice of tasks they can perform. In Act 1 there are few optional items so players will visit each of the nodes at some point.

Act 2

When looking at the stats for Act 2 (27 blue, 25 purple, and 114 grey) it’s apparent that most of the nodes in this act can be done by either character. In Act 2 the Sleuthhounds come together for the first time and basically spend the entire act working side-by-side, which accounts for the high proportion of grey nodes (tasks that either character can do).

The dependency chart shows that the simple linear progression of Act 1 is gone. Instead, there’s a lot more vertical spread in the chart denoting different sets of tasks that the player can switch between and work on at the same time. These tasks tend to be clumped into rough groups in the chart with each group more or less corresponding to the search of one suspect’s cabin. In other words, players generally have a choice of different cabins to search at any time, but within a given cabin the progression is more linear.

Act 3

My original thought was that Act 2 would be a larger act to play, in terms of the number of things the player has to do, than in Act 3. Looking at the numbers, Act 3 seems larger with 196 nodes versus Act 2’s 189. However, without looking at the details of the nodes (which I’ve left out to avoid spoilers) the one bit of information missing from this high level look at the charts is that a good deal of what’s in Act 3 is optional.

While there’s still some clustering of nodes in Act 3, which tends to represent individual puzzle paths, it’s easy to see that the chart is stretched out more horizontally and that some nodes that appear early on in the chart on the left connect to nodes that appear much farther along to the right. Part of this is due to simple task A must be done before task B. However, part of it is due to optional paths through the act that can be taken if the player does not succeed at task A. They still have to get to task B but depending on the choices they make and how they do at certain earlier tasks, it may be necessary to complete optional tasks that otherwise wouldn’t be needed. Compare that to Act 2 where the vast majority of nodes will need to be visited by players, instead of being optional.

One of the other interesting things we see with the stats for Act 3 is the much higher counts for Homes (97) and Ampson (78) individually and the lower count of stuff that either one of them can do (11). This is because in Act 3 the characters spend a lot of time working independently and so the tasks that must be performed are specific to them.

Counterintuitively, although numerically Ampson has fewer nodes than Homes in Act 3 I believe she actually has more gameplay time. There are many differences between Ampson and Homes but one of the key ones is that Ampson is more focused on the people in Act 3 and Homes is more focused on following the physical evidence. Ampson gets to conduct a number of interviews in Act 3 where she pulls together the whereabouts and movements of various characters. Each such interview only shows up as one node in the puzzle dependency chart but those nodes tend to pack more into them for the player to do than the nodes for Homes’s path. Although the puzzle dependency chart is supposed to show each individual task that needs to be done, the format of the interviews is such that it’s best to represent them by one node in the chart and use other tools to track the details of what is done in an interview.

Given that there are more optional nodes in Act 3 than in Act 2, I do feel that on any given playthrough a player will have less stuff to do in Act 3 than Act 2. At the same time, the interrelationships between the things players can do in Act 3 is much more complex. Consequently, I expect Act 3 will take longer for players to puzzle out than Act 2.

Act 4 will be interesting to compare to these first three acts, once its puzzle dependency chart is complete. Act 4 will start off rather wide but will narrow down as it goes, moving towards a more linear structure towards the end as the player gets closer to the climax of the story and the denouement that follows. The characters will also be working more closely together again so expect to see the proportion of grey nodes go up, although probably not quite to the same level as in Act 2.

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