Sneaky, Sneaky

May 17, 2019

I’ve long considered Sleuthhounds: Cruise to be my big feature length game. While I’ve done a number of Sleuthhounds games already, they’ve all been short stories compared to the novel of Cruise. With the expanded scope that a feature length game offers I’ve been taking every opportunity to incorporate as much variety in the gameplay as possibly, while still having it work in a basic point-n-click format. Such is the case with the latest scenario I’ve added this week: delivering breakfast to Ampson.

Cruises are very pampering experiences. The staff always seem to do their best to relieve any stress or strain on the passengers. I took that basic idea and exaggerated it for the newest sequence in Cruise. Here Pureluck Homes is up early and as a nice gesture he’s getting a breakfast tray from the dining room to bring up to Jane Ampson. However, the staff are only too eager to take the tray for him, which obviously would lessen the impact of the gesture.

It’s a more lighthearted moment in the game, which comes following the climactic events at the end of Act 3. To succeed at his mission, Homes must make his way through several rooms on the ship, avoiding the staff who will take the breakfast tray away to deliver themselves. It sounds a bit like a stealth sequence and I will be the first to admit that stealth sequences, especially in point-n-click adventure games, can be downright terrible (I’m looking at you guard dog with the x-ray vision in Sherlock Holmes: Secret of the Silver Earring). However, I’ve taken steps to hopefully eliminate the frustration and increase the fun.

The most important thing about reducing the frustration of this section is that it adheres to my success-through-failure principle. Some games, such as the aforementioned Silver Earring force players to keep replaying stealth sequences over and over until successful. Those games also tend to provide no feedback on what guards can see or how they can catch the player. Players then get into the problem of trying to guess what it is that the game expects of them, which can lead to repeated failure and frustration. With the success-through-failure-concept in Cruise if the player gets caught it’s not the end of the world nor are they forced to repeat the section. Instead the story simply adapts and keeps moving forward, with the staff members bringing the breakfast to Ampson instead of Homes.

[The reddish cone on the floor helps show where not to step when sneaking by.]
The reddish cone on the floor helps show where not to step when sneaking by.

The second thing I’ve done to help with this section is to take a page from dedicated 2D stealth games. In these it’s quite common to see cones displayed on screen that represent the area a given guard can see. Step into these cones and you get caught by the guards. I’ve taken these cones and brought them into Sleuthhounds.

Providing this visual feedback is extra important in this instance. Games that are focused solely on stealth usually take time to teach players how to play them, increasing the level of difficulty as they go along. Players have the opportunity to understand how they are detected by guards in such games. Games like Cruise that bring in stealth as a sort of one-off mechanic must (but rarely do) take pains to make the sequences easy and forgiving because the main focus of the game isn’t on stealth and so players have had no opportunity to practice difficult stealth sections. The visual indicators make it clear where not to step in order to be able to avoid being caught.

While stealth can be extremely frustrating when handled poorly, I’d like to think I’ve learned from the missteps of other adventure game developers and have implemented a section that provides enough of a challenge as to be fun without being so challenging as to be frustrating. Bringing in more variety helps to keep the gameplay fresh in Cruise. However, whenever I introduce some new element I’m always thinking about how to help players understand it. Software is about communication and if players don’t “get” how something works it’s because I haven’t communicated that clearly enough.