Refining Practically

February 16, 2018

Design work on the next Sleuthhounds game is ongoing for both high level story direction and lower level puzzle design. One such puzzle not seen in a Sleuthhounds game before is of such a nature that it has needed a different approach to designing it. While many puzzles can simply be thought through or else sketched out on paper, the moving parts of this particular puzzle required a more hands on design tool: board games and Lego.

Without delving into spoiler territory on its specifics, the puzzle in question takes place in the dining room of the cruise ship that Pureluck homes and Jane Ampson find themselves on. For this particular sequence, the dining room is crowded with tables and the other passengers on the ship. Following a grid pattern, Homes and Ampson have to work together to shuffle passengers around the tables to make a clear path to their goals.

With five tables and fourteen passengers, not counting Homes and Ampson, there were a lot of pieces in play to consider, more so than I could think through in my head or work out even with sketches on paper. After a bit of thought I hit on the idea of breaking out some physical supplies to build up the puzzle practically.

First I started by creating the basic grid layout for the dining room scene by using the square tiles that come in the game Carcassonne: The Discovery. The tiles were extremely useful because I could easily shift them around to tweak the layout to work with the movement rules for the passengers.

For the passengers themselves I turned to some medieval Lego sets I had kicking around. The medieval sets, in addition to providing minifigures for the suspects, also provided Lego horses that fit nicely on groups of four Carcassonne tiles to represent tables. The Lego sets also provided some small huts that I could place to represent stairwells and a large statue placed in the center of the dining room. Here’s what the layout looks like from above:

The pyhysical model seen from above.
Click to view larger.

As with the tiles, the Lego pieces were easy to move around in order to tweak the positioning of the tables, passengers, and stairwells. Having this rapid way of physically prototyping the puzzle quickly firmed up in my mind how the puzzle should work and what the specific rules would be for having passengers move about as Homes and Ampson interact with them. This refinement would have been much more difficult and would have taken much longer if I had tried to do it just with pencil and paper or even prototyping it in some sort of digital form.

Having the actual physical layout allowed me to view the puzzle from various angles. For the rooms in the Sleuthhounds games I always try to twist the perspective they’re viewed from at least a little bit so that they’re a little more interesting to look at and don’t have the mechanical feel that they would have if they were drawn with straight lines and ninety degree angles. As I moved around the physical model of the puzzle it became apparent that this was one case where I would have to go with a more straight on view in the actual room. I found that looking at the puzzle from other angles made it more difficult to see all the important pieces and how they would move relative to one another. This was a situation where to make the puzzle clearer for players to solve the view had to be very simple.

The physical model viewed from a simple angle that still allows it to be playable.
Click to view larger.

The physical model was all well and good and was extremely useful in working out how I thought the puzzle should function. The big question was, would the puzzle actually work properly when translated into the digital realm.

Having refined the puzzle as far as I could physically, I then began working on it in a very crude form in the game engine itself. Using character sprites from previous Sleuthhounds games I put together a semi-playable prototype. It’s not pretty, but it is functional:

The rough prototype implemented in the game engine.
Click to view larger.

Here Homes, Ampson, and the other suspects can move around on the orange and brown grid tiles. The dark gray tiles will be occupied by the tables, stairwells, and the grand statue. Even though the room won’t be viewed from an “interesting” angle there should be enough elements to make it visually interesting while the basic grid will allow the puzzle to be playable.

Given the unique nature of this puzzle, the next step will be to refine its visual look a little more. There are some aspects of the puzzle not depicted here that need to be incorporated in order to give players enough information to be able to solve the puzzle. Once I’ve done that incorporation I’ll be looking to put the puzzle in front of some actual players to see how they fare with it.

The nature of the puzzle is such that a number of animations are required to make full sense of what’s going on. It will take a while to get those animations in place, especially as my attention now is divided between working on the animations and dealing with other aspects of the overall game design. However, I’ll be blogging about those other design initiatives in the weeks to come.

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