Escaping the Balcony (A Goldilocks Puzzle)

April 19, 2019

Critical path scripting for Act 3 of Sleuthhounds: Cruise is almost complete. As I’ve previously reported, Act 3 has Jane Ampson and Pureluck Homes operating independent of one another for the most part. Last week I finished the last puzzle section for Ampson’s side of the act. This week, I’ve completed the last outstanding puzzle section for Pureluck Homes but not without some difficulties.

When I’m working on a story, I tend to bounce around a lot. I’ll work on the scenes that I have ideas for first and then come back and fill in the bits that I’m less certain about. This applies to working on Cruise as well. The benefit of doing this is that the parts that I already know get put in very quickly. The downside is that the sections that I’m uncertain of all pile up for the end and just require a lot of brain juice to sort through. Such was the case for the last puzzle sequence I had left for Homes.

At one point during Act 3 it’s necessary for Homes to sneak into one passenger’s cabin to locate an item that another passenger needs. However, before Homes can escape the owner of the cabin returns and Homes has to take shelter out on the cabin’s balcony. So far so good but the problem I ran into was that I didn’t know how to get Homes off of the balcony. The passenger remains in the cabin so Homes can’t go out that way and there are no other balconies in easy reach.

In reviewing the layout of the ship (I have a big image that puts all of the different rooms in their positions relative to one another) I saw that the cabin in question was just above the deck with the life rafts. As the cabin is one of the most opulent aboard it occurred to me that the passenger would likely have first class access to the life rafts in the event of the ship, you know, sinking. I decided that it made sense for a control panel to be placed upon the balcony that could be used to bring the life raft right up to the cabin and then lower it again.

[A maritime elevator.]
A maritime elevator.

The difficulty here was a lack of difficulty. It seemed too easy and rather anticlimactic to simply have Homes walk out to the balcony, activate the control panel, and descend to the deck below as if using a glorified elevator. This particular puzzle is only available when running the game on the highest difficulty setting, Super Sleuth, so then I started thinking of how I could bulk the puzzle chain up.

First, I decided that the control panel should be locked and Homes would have to pick the lock. As there are a number of lock picking challenges in Act 2 that didn’t seem particularly special. Then I thought that maybe when the life raft descends it bypasses the lower deck because the controls break and splashes into the water. From their Homes would have to loosen the boat from the tethers holding it and drift back a ways along the side of the hull. At that point he’d find an exhaust port of sorts, where the ship’s bilge would be discharging. He’d have to get into the port then make his way through the bowels of the ship until he could get back into the normal passenger and crew areas.

This certainly added a lot of steps into the sequence but it felt really rather daft. It had become a sequence of puzzles for the sake of puzzles rather than an integral part of the story. When I got to that point I very much felt like Goldilocks. The first solution was too easy. The second was too complicated. I needed something in between that was just right.

Being unable to come up with a satisfactory solution, I kept pushing back the balcony scenario in development. My ability to do so ended when I came back to it this week as the final sequence that needed to be implemented for Homes. I actually got to the point where I was thinking one evening that I should just chuck the puzzle entirely. On the other difficulty settings in the game the player can hide out on the balcony and just wait as the passenger of the cabin is only briefly stopping inside before leaving again.

Fortunately, inspiration struck at the last minute. I realized that the sequence was missing any sort of climax. Sure, Homes escaped being detected but nothing further happened. There was no consequence to Homes having snooped through the cabin.

Now that I’ve completed the sequence, Homes still uses the life raft to start to descend from the balcony. However, the saboteur running loose aboard the ship has gotten to the ropes supporting the raft. As the raft snaps free of its tethers, Homes is left dangling from one of them (consequence!). How does he escape? Does he even escape? Well, I can’t ruin the whole sequence. You’ll just have to wait for the final game to see how Goldilocks evades the three bears.