Rewrites and Recodes

June 7, 2019

It’s always tricky balancing both story and puzzles in an adventure game. While puzzles should emerge naturally from story the thought process of putting a puzzle sequence together is quite different from putting a story together. In the former the focus is on figuring out all the puzzle pieces and how they fit together into something satisfying to solve – very technical in nature. In the latter the focus is on characters and their feelings and motivations – much more emotional centric. In Sleuthhounds: Cruise this occasionally leads to situations where a puzzle grows beyond itself and causes problems for the story. It hasn’t happened too often but one such occurrence hit just this week.

Early in Act 4 I needed to get Ampson and Homes into the cabin of Joanna Price to do some snooping around. However, a challenge existed in that by that point in the story there was no real reason to suspect that searching Joanna’s cabin, out of all the cabins available, would yield anything of interest. In the course of developing the plot it turns out that Act 4 is set on Joanna’s birthday. It occurred to me that I could have another character visit Joanna’s cabin to deliver a birthday present and then accidentally see the mysterious something that the Sleuthhounds were supposed to find. Having seen this something said character – Edward Noble in this case – could then go to the Sleuthhounds and mention seeing it in order to give the player a reason to go investigate the cabin.

So far so good. However, one of the lessons I learned from working on Act 2 directly pertained to the searching of cabins. Said lesson went like this: when searching a room it’s important that there be an easily perceivable goal to reach so that the player can start making connections on what steps are needed to actually get there. I therefore set about developing a multi-stage puzzle that ultimately leads to a hidden compartment in Joanna’s cabin where the mysterious something is kept. This is where I got a bit too focused on the puzzle and lost sight of the story.

It was only after I had the puzzle sequence implemented that a problem struck me. In order for Edward to have seen the hidey hole where the something was kept, he himself would have had to work through the puzzle sequence, actively searching out the hidey hole. This was a problem because it seemed to me that, given the difficulty of finding the hiding place, the natural question that would arise for players would be, “Who knows about this hiding spot?” The obvious answer, of course, was Edward. In a mystery it’s not enough to lay in clues that point to who the guilty party is. It’s equally important to ensure that there isn’t another interpretation of events that points squarely at an innocent character.

I didn’t want to lose the puzzle sequence, but the initial setup for it placed the finger of guilt onto Edward and Edward alone. These kinds of niggling plot holes really gnaw at me. I set the sequence aside for a bit and moved onto other parts of Act 4. In due course it occurred to me that if Edward was escorted into Joanna’s cabin by a member of the staff so that two characters discovered the mysterious something at the same time that I might be able to get out of the corner I’d painted myself into.

Finding evidence with Edward and Carlotta.

There was still the issue of the complexity to find the hidey hole, however. Even that wasn’t too bad once I started thinking along the different story lines though. The mysterious something consists of a, well let’s call it a piece of paper. As such it seemed credible to have said paper slightly sticking out of the hiding spot. That way Edward and Carlotta, the staff member accompanying him, could both spot it and become suspicious about it. Together they could then go to Homes and Ampson and inform them of the discovery.

In the initial conception, Joanna herself was supposed to either be in the room while Homes and Ampson were searching or come in at the conclusion of the search. Depending on if she was there or not, the Sleuthhounds would either be invited in or else would have to find a way into her cabin via its adjoining balcony.

I had most of that already in place and working by the time I realized there was a story issue. For various reasons, some unrelated to this specific problem, it worked out better to never have Joanna there and to have Carlotta, the maid, be the one to admit the Sleuthhounds into the cabin. Of course, that meant that getting into the cabin via the balcony no longer made sense.

It took the better part of a day to pull out the pieces that no longer applied and put in the new stuff as a result to the change in the story. I was disappointed to see some of the stuff go but overall the story makes more sense now and the final sequence is actually more satisfying than what was originally there. It goes to show it’s not wise to get too attached to ideas. An idea may be good in and of itself but if it doesn’t work for the piece as a whole then it actually makes for a stronger finished piece by taking that idea out.

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