Use micro SMG with ill-fated motorcyclist

Posted by Kerry on June 15, 2008 | Permalink

When I first roughed this game out, I had a few key puzzles in mind. As time went on, I fleshed them out (or realised that they were rubbish and scrapped them) and I’m happy with the results - I think I have a couple of really nice set pieces in there. The smaller puzzles - the meat and bones of an adventure game, really - proved to be much more of a challenge.

My first draft of the plot featured an awful lot of trawling around, delivering A to B and the like. I realised that there was just too much walking between screens and tightened that side of things up - now the puzzles tend to be fairly near their solutions, avoiding the godawful drudgery of those games that make you walk back five miles because you forgot to pick up a newspaper. However, that still left the problem of sameyness - there are only so many people who can want items that are conveniently two screens away before your lovingly constructed world starts to feel like a particularly tiresome exercise in box-ticking.

As I’ve been focusing mainly on the functionality at the moment, I decided to leave the puzzles for a while and return to them when I was feeling more inspired. Readers, that time has come.

The inspiration for sorting this out came, strangely, not from an adventure game but from GTA IV. I’ve been playing this quite a bit recently, and one of the things that has impressed me most is the way it gets so much mileage (arf!) out of a fairly simple game mechanic. Although a lot of the missions - particularly the side missions - are basically very similar, the game remains fresh and fun throughout. This is partly due to the superb main narrative, but also due to the imaginative use of mini-narratives within each mission - the changes in mood and motivation are expertly handled, and create a genuinely different feeling from one mission to the next.

With this in mind, I’ve taken a fresh look at the placeholder puzzles I’ve got left to fix, and I’m confident that with a bolder use of mood, motivation and character, I can do something rather good with them and lift them above despised hoop-jumpery that plagues this genre. Or, failing that, just lock every single door in the game and make the key holders ask you riddles*.

* I promise you I’m kidding.

Categories: Clouds Beyond Clouds