Ramping Up Difficulty in an Adventure

April 5, 2019

Overall, Act 3 of Sleuthhounds: Cruise is shaping up to be a slightly smaller act, in terms of what players need to do, than Act 2. That said, I expect Act 3 to take longer to play through because even though there are fewer puzzles to solve the difficulty of Act 3 is higher. This is a direct result of the considered plan I have to increase the difficulty of the game as the player goes along. In action based games increasing the difficulty can be as easy as allowing enemies to both take and give more damage. Within an adventure game the levers for increasing difficulty aren't quite as apparent but they do still exist.

Direction

Within an adventure, direction refers to how clearly the game describes both what a player needs to do and how they should go about doing it. The more of both the easier a game becomes. Conversely, the less direction the game provides the more challenging the experience is as the player first has to sort out where their focus is best applied before being able to solve the puzzles they're encountering.

In the first act of Cruise players are given very clear direction on what they need to do. Whether it's dialog prompting them to investigate various aspects of a crime scene or it's a list of key articles to collect in the ship's library, the player is given both a goal and the general strokes of how to attain it.

As the game progresses, the amount of direction decreases. In Act 2, for example, players are given the rather general direction of searching the cabins of various passengers. The cabins are all located in close proximity to one another in an area of the ship that the player has had some familiarity with from Act 1, making it easy to find these challenges. The details of what players need to do in each cabin are a bit more nebulous, requiring more thought from players to sort out.

By the time of Act 3 the player is initially given a couple of very high level goals to accomplish in the investigation. They then have to do some exploration to figure out what exactly is needed.

Context

The concept of context applies to the specific situations a player is in and what resources they have at their disposal. Whereas direction tends to be explicitly given, contextual information is usually more subtle, possibly even fully implicit. For example, if the player encounters a locked door and they have a ring of keys then contextually, based on how the real world works, players should “get” that they need to use the keys on the door to proceed.

Relying on real world knowledge is good for basic contextual interactions within the game. However, to include certain types of more challenging puzzles within an adventure that use items in an unusual way it’s still necessary to build up enough game specific context for things to make sense to the player.

At one point in Act 3 it is necessary to prepare a costume of sorts. Part of this requires a wig or wig substitute. In this particular case, the end of a mop is needed. However, that’s an unusual use for a cleaning device. A clue is therefore necessary to provide a bit of the cartoon context of the Sleuthhounds world to have the puzzle make sense. For example, the costume being prepared is based on a photo to which a character may comment that the person in the photo “has quite a mop top” in reference to their hair.

Early on in Cruise there are few “outside the box” uses of items. Instead their usage relies on real world application. As the game progresses, some items are used in more unusual ways and the game provides more hints about these different contexts in which the items are employed. This is a real balancing act as too much information here and the game essentially solves the puzzles instead of the player doing so. However, too little context and players will be left adrift, stumbling for a solution and likely complaining about it when they do find it. In adventure games I’ve played with “guess the developer’s mind” syndrome it’s almost always due to there not being enough context provided.

Density

Puzzles typically have multiple pieces that go into them. These might be items that have to be used in specific ways and in specific places or they might be key lines of dialog that need to be said to non-player characters. Players have to collect these pieces, literally or metaphorically, and figure out how they go together. Density accounts for how close together these pieces are in the game world.

If all the pieces needed to solve a puzzle are presented together on one screen then that puzzle will be easier to solve than if the puzzle pieces are scattered across the entire game world. Even puzzles that are objectively easier can become more difficult simply because their parts have been separated.

The design challenge here is that if parts are too far scattered, and the puzzle lacks sufficient direction and context, then there is the risk that players won’t find the needed pieces or worse yet, not even realize that they’re missing a piece. All that said, as Cruise goes along, puzzle pieces get distributed farther apart. To keep this fair for the players no pieces are placed off in isolation from anything else. There is always some other sequence in the game that will guide players (direction) to those places so that players can see the elements there, even if they have no current use for those elements.

Density also refers to how compact the environment is that the player can move around in. During Act 1 the player’s movements are very carefully confined. Players never have more than three rooms to deal with at any given time. In Act 2, the player has a greater run of the ship but puzzles tend to be localized, meaning that most if not all pieces for a particular challenge are confined in one location specific to that puzzle. By Act 3 the game world has opened up significantly and players have to bring together pieces from disparate parts of the ship.

Non-Linearity

Non-linearity is the degree to which a game allows the player to do things in different orders. People tend to like lists, which are basically a way of linearly organizing different things to do. On the adventure front, the more linear a game is the easier it tends to be. Players generally have an easier time doing steps A, B, C and D in that order than doing step B before step A or else step C and then moving to step D but only if step E has not been done.

In act 1 of Cruise there is very little non-linearity. There are a few minor places where players can do things in different orders; however, they ultimately have to do everything anyway. In act 2 there is more non-linearity as players can search the different cabins in whatever order they want, including stopping searching one cabin in favour of going to search a different one. However, within those cabins, the puzzle chains that need to be solved are still mostly linear.

For act 3, the difficulty increases a notch. Not only are there more different tasks players can do scattered across the ship but the order they do those tasks in matters. For example, have Homes reunite two characters early on in the act and they become inaccessible to Ampson, requiring her to do something else in order to get access to those characters. Whereas if Ampson acts first, she may be able to talk to the necessary characters, which in turn may require Homes to do something else that he wouldn’t have to do otherwise.

Hint Systems

It’s no fun getting stuck in a game. If the game fails to provide enough direction and context and is so non-linear and lacking in density that a player doesn’t even know where they should be looking in order to advance then that’s on the designer (I don’t believe in “user error” in software; software is a one-way form of communication and if the user doesn’t understand what needs to be done it’s because the designer hasn’t done a good job communicating that information). While I’m doing my best to make Cruise solvable I do acknowledge that some people will likely get stuck at various points.

To address this, the game will have the same built in hint systems as the earlier Sleuthhounds games. At a high level, the player will be able to check their in game journal for their current to do list. This tracks at a high level what a player still has to do. For example, there might be an item in the list like “Search the Colonel’s cabin.”

If that’s insufficient there will also be the same fully integrated, tiered help system that the previous games have had. With this, players will be able to get three levels of hints for puzzles they’re facing ranging from vague nudges in the right direction through to the exact solutions being spelled out. The benefit of an integrated hint system is that it can look at the state of the game and provide hints that are directly relevant to where the player is at without spoiling anything else. This will be particularly useful in act 3 where the non-linearity means that players might not encounter some puzzles at all or might find some puzzles altered based on the order they solve things in.

Conclusion

I haven’t mentioned the fourth and final act of the game at all in the above for the very simple reason that I haven’t started working on it. I’m still heading towards the completion of Act 3 first. However, I do know how Act 4 will proceed structurally. Act 3 of the game should be the most challenging for players as it will provide the least direction, have the lowest puzzle piece density, and will be the most non-linear. Act 4, in contrast will progressively collapse back in towards a linear path with a higher degree of direction.

This return to a linear path makes sense within the broader concept of storytelling. Whether it be a movie, a book, a TV show, or any other form of storytelling, inevitably a story reaches a tipping point. Not the climax, but the point in the story where everything from that point to the climax must proceed in a straight linear line with no more room for diversions.

I’ve played adventures that have gotten to that tipping point but haven’t realized it. Such games throw in a bunch of puzzles that while interesting and challenging in their own right are diversions from the overarching narrative. As with scenes in a story, no matter how good a puzzle is in isolation if it’s getting in the way of the overall story then it has to go. Games that don’t recognize this become annoying to play because players by that point are invested in the story and want to get on with it but the game is making them jump through unwanted hoops first.

Overall I’ve set up Cruise to get progressively more difficult through its first three acts, where investigation and puzzle solving is key to progressing the story. However, through Act 4 as the criminal (or criminals) becomes more apparent the ebb and flow of the design and the pace of the storytelling mean that the non-linearity will disappear, the density will increase, and greater direction will be provided. Even so, don’t expect it to be too easy!

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