Finding Focus

November 16, 2018

For quite some time now I’ve been working on scripting the critical path through the second act of Sleuthhounds: Cruise. One aspect of this part of the game is that players have the opportunity to snoop around the cabins of several of the guests aboard the cruise liner looking for clues. Although I sat down ahead of time and planned out various puzzle sequences for each room, nothing was really coming together. This was draining on me as I was implementing these sequences as I just didn’t feel like they’re were all that fun to play let alone special in any sort of way.

Feeling a bit bogged down on Cruise because of these room investigations, I took a couple of days off to play around with a few other non-Sleuthhounds game ideas I had. The break did me a world of good because when I came back to work on the scripting of Sleuthhounds again, I realized what was wrong with investigating the rooms. Namely, a lack of focus.

My initial idea was that each room to be investigated would have two or three pieces of information hidden somewhere in the room that needed to be discovered. This led to several problems that I instinctively felt were there but was only able to articulate when I took a step back from the game:

  1. There was no good way to cue players on how many of these arbitrary bits of information they needed to find in each room.
  2. There was no also no good way to let players know how much progress they’d made in each room and if they were done with a given room.
  3. Given that each room visually needs to be somewhat similar, being a part of the same cruise ship and all, there wasn’t a lot of opportunity for unique hiding places. This meant that searching a given room had a samey-same feel as searching each of the other rooms.

In looking at the bits of information I wanted the player to discover, I realized that some of the information was nice character back story but ultimately irrelevant, some of it could be moved elsewhere in the game to where it could have more of an impact, and the rest of it could be consolidated into single sources of information per room. That was a key conclusion to come to because it meant I could cut out a lot of the arbitrary information and focus each room into finding out one key thing about those rooms’ occupants.

This change in the amount of information that needed to be discovered also meant that the puzzle sequences in the rooms could become much more focused. Instead of blindly searching a room for an uncertain number of information sources it became possible to place one particular “locked gate” in a room that a player could find easily. The challenge then shifts from finding where the information is to figuring out how to get at it.

For example, in one room players originally needed to find information in a closet, under a bed, and in a wall safe. It seemed odd that any character would hide stuff in a closet and under the bed when they already had a wall safe available to them. Consequently I reworked the design of this room to have the key information hidden in the safe. The player still has to search other areas of the room to gather clues on how to open the safe, but now all of those steps are focused towards that one goal.

One of the benefits of focusing a room from three goals down to one is that the puzzle sequence for that one goal can become more layered and interesting to solve. After reworking the design for each of the rooms, the number of steps that a player carries out is roughly the same as before, but now they all carry the game forward to one puzzle solution per room instead of three. Hopefully this will make for much more rewarding puzzle sequences to solve.

The other major benefit of reducing from three challenges per room to one challenge per room is that it’s much easier to make those challenges different. Whereas before the rooms were like random treasure hunts, now the puzzle sequences incorporate aspects of the personalities of the characters that inhabit each room. Although some actions, like searching through closets, are the same the overall arcs of the puzzle sequences are now significantly different and much more interesting.

After having a couple of sluggish weeks of development when the rooms were less focused and not really getting nearly as much accomplished as I should have, refocusing the rooms has changed things around. The puzzle sequences feel like they’re working now. They’re much more varied. They’re no longer arbitrary, now being grounded in aspects of the characters and story instead. And they’re more layered and interesting to work through. In just under two weeks, I’ve now almost completed all of the room searches for Act 2, which takes me well past the halfway point for the act. Morale is high and productivity has increased!