Lock Picking

August 3, 2018

In previous Sleuthhounds games I’ve always enjoyed incorporating the specialty “accent” screens. These are things like Homes’s deductions, Ampson’s timeline puzzles, the various Halloween games in The Halloween Deception, and so on. They switch into special views where the player directly interacts with their elements rather than using things like inventory items and the like. For Sleuthhounds: Cruise I have several new types of these and the last day or so I’ve been working on one specifically for Pureluck Homes: the art of lock picking.

As a detective, Homes on occasion needs to be able to get into areas that have been barred to him. Trained by the escapist Hootini himself, Homes has picked up a few skills when it comes to circumventing locks. In The Unlocked Room one of the earliest challenges players encounter (if they’re playing the game on a hard enough difficulty setting) is an early lock picking puzzle. It did what it needed to for that game, but the nature of it meant it was a fair bit of effort to get it working behind the scenes.

For Cruise I knew there were multiple locks that Homes would have to pick during the course of the game. I wanted to have a system that would easily allow me to incorporate these different locks and adjust how difficult they were without having to re-implement each lock one by one. Fortunately, I had some inspiration to draw on from the past.

First and foremost I enjoy playing adventure games. However, that hasn’t stopped me playing a wide variety of other types of games over the years. One of the most enjoyably series of games I’ve played is the original Thief trilogy. To this day, Thief 2 is still one of my top ten favourite games. It was in Thief 3 that I found my inspiration though.

The Thief games have you play, as the title suggests, a thief and they promote being stealthy and avoiding guards and doing thiefy things like, among other tasks, picking locks. In the first two games that was a pretty passive activity. You would select one of two lock picks from your inventory as your active item and then click and hold the left mouse button on a given lock. The handle of the lock would rattle for a bit and then the lock would open. Not much to it.

In Thief 3 the lock picking mechanic was reworked. Here, clicking on a lock would display a series of concentric rings. You then had to rotate one lock pick around the circumference of the outer ring until you found a place where the ring started to jiggle. If it jiggled enough you could click the mouse and the ring would “open” exposing access to the next ring in the series. In such fashion you would progress through all the rings until you opened the final one and unlocked the lock.

It was a simple mechanic to learn and it allowed the game to easily make different locks more or less challenging. Need a harder lock? Simply add more rings to increase the amount of time the player needs to get through them and the likeliness the player will be discovered by the guards before they can finish.

Rough prototype of lockpicking in Cruise.

It’s been years since I player Thief 3 but its lock picking system has always stuck with me. It’s a simple system and one that works pretty well within a point-n-click game like Sleuthhounds. As an homage to one of my favourite series, I’ve brought in those basic mechanics for the lock picking into Cruise. I have a couple of ideas on how to change it up to not be a complete rip of what Thief 3 did, but to start with I wanted to get the basics into place.

The lock picking system works nicely and accomplishes the different goals I had for it. It makes for a good change of pace from normal inventory challenges within Cruise, it’s simple to use, and it was easy to parameterize to allow it to be made more or less difficult with a different number of rings. I’m quite pleased with how it’s worked out and thankful to the Thief 3 team for coming up with the idea in the first place.

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