Characters: Sources of Problems and Solutions

March 22, 2019

Across the years that I’ve been writing in various forms – comics, prose, games – I’ve come to understand the importance of listening to characters in a piece. Characters are not simply soulless widgets to be moved about in a story. When written properly, characters will take over the story and tell you, the writer, what they can and what they can’t do. This past week I ran into a couple of such situations while working on the third act of the Sleuthhounds: Cruise game.

One of the issues with making a traditional point-n-click adventure game, of which Cruise is one, is the incorporation of puzzles. There need to be challenges incorporated into the game that the player has to solve. The risk is in becoming too hung up on the puzzles and not paying enough attention to the story and characters. This is when you run into terrible scenarios like the fake-moustache-from-jam-and-cat-hair puzzle of Gabriel Knight 3.

Geographically Speaking

The first problem I ran into this week concerned the maid Carlotta and the daughter of the cruise liner Joanna. In a particular puzzle sequence, Pureluck Homes has to trick Carlotta into following him to meet Joanna to accomplish a certain end. That puzzle wasn’t hard to implement and it followed from the character motivations in the game. All well and good.

Carlotta and Joanna ended up in a location where Ampson couldn't access them.

The problem I had was that at this point in the game Pureluck Homes and Jane Ampson are operating independently and have access to different parts of the ship. The place where Carlotta and Joanna meet was in the Homes part of the ship. This was an issue because it’s important in this section of the game that Ampson have access to Carlotta and specifically not have access to Joanna (Joanna being out of bounds is key to a number of other puzzles).

I got stuck for a bit here because I couldn’t figure out how to separate Carlotta and Joanna after they met in order to bring Carlotta back to a location where Ampson could access her without bringing Joanna along. Character wise there was just too much motivation for Carlotta and Joanna to stay together that I couldn’t figure out how to split them up again. It was as if the two were saying to me, “So we’re together in a space Ampson can’t access. So what? That’s her problem not ours.”

It’s when they said that that I realized, they were right. Carlotta and Joanna should be together and the fact that they’re in a place Ampson can’t get to at that point really is Ampson’s problem. Once I got past trying to figure out how to separate Carlotta and Joanna – because that seemed like the most expedient solution – I was able to take a look at the rest of act 3 and I realized there was another scenario I already had in place that occurs later in the act that with a bit of tweaking would cause Carlotta to move back to a part of the ship Ampson could access.

The end result here is that Carlotta and Joanna meet thanks to Homes and they stay together with Carlotta temporarily off limits to Ampson. It’s only later, after the player has done a number of other things, that Carlotta again becomes accessible to Ampson. And that’s fine. It adds a bit more challenge for the player, which is what I wanted for act 3 anyway, and it remains honest to the characters.

I’m a Real Boy

The second challenging scenario I encountered was with one of the passengers, Edward Noble. Edward shows up in the background here and there earlier in the game but act 3 is really the first time the player has a chance to interact with him in any significant way. The problem was, any scenarios I designed around him just didn’t feel right. It’s hard to describe, but every now and then when you’re creating something you come up with an idea that you just know is not working and will not work no matter how hard you try.

All Edward wanted was a storyline of his own.

Edward had a certain amount of information that he needed to convey to the player. In my approach to the character that was about all I knew for him for act 3. I made the mistake of thinking that the information Edward had was the goal and that I needed to put a bunch of obstacles in the way of the player reaching that goal. So I came up with all manner of things that were going to stop the player from talking directly to Edward. At one point I had an extended sequence where Edward would be occupied with some distraction, the player, as Ampson, would overcome that distraction but before she could talk to Edward he’d be distracted by something else. Four times!

There were some good puzzles in isolation in that whole chain but even just on paper they felt like busy work. They were obstacles for the sake of obstacles and didn’t add anything of value to the characters, plot, or tension (if a scene does nothing to advance characters, plot, or tension then it’s definitely a scene that needs to hit the chopping block). I really got bogged down by that and just put Edward and his puzzles on the shelf for a bit.

It was while I was out taking a walk – I am a great proponent of taking walks to get the creative juices going – not really thinking about anything in particular that my mind finally got quiet enough me to hear Edward say, “Everybody else in this act gets a really cool storyline. Why do I just get to be an info dump at the end of a puzzle chain?”

When that popped into my head I quite literally stopped in my tracks (fortunately there wasn’t anybody walking behind me). I realized that Edward was absolutely right. Act 3 has a bunch of characters in it and the player gets to find out a whole host of the secrets they’ve all been hiding. All of them, that is, except for Edward. Edward had no story for himself in act 3. While all the other non-player characters were out and about doing things to advance their own agendas Edward wasn’t. I could have replaced him with an encyclopedia of facts about the case that the player finds for all Edward’s character I was using.

Once I realized that Edward needed something to do I went back to the bios I’d written for the characters and from rereading them very quickly found something that Edward could be working towards, and need the player’s help with, in act 3. Not only that, I saw that Edward could solve an issue with another puzzle I was having difficulty with for another character. All of a sudden all of the pieces fit together. I got really excited about what Edward would get to do in act 3 and that’s when I knew I had it right.

Conclusion

It’s a tricky thing, integrating puzzles into an adventure game. You want those puzzles to be internally consistent and make logical sense, which requires thinking about them in a very sort of intellectual way. However, when you’re dealing with characters you need to think about them in terms of motivations and emotions, a very different sort of approach.

I was so worried about getting the puzzles right that I lost sight of the characters in a couple of places. As soon as I took a step back and looked at things through the eyes of those characters and thought about where they were at and what they wanted then everything fit together.

It’s a lesson I learned before but one that I clearly needed to learn again. When you force characters to do things that they have no reason to do that’s when the story and/or puzzles start feeling contrived. When you listen to the characters they will guide you to what’s right. The beauty of that is that if you’re truly focused on the characters it’s not possible to have a false moment in your storytelling because everything comes from them as if they’re real people. Now, you’ll have to excuse me, I have a whole cast of characters who apparently have notes for me.

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