GDC Vault offers for free a lecture from the 2009 Game Developers Conference on how to design puzzles effectively to help players feel smart, given by Tiger Style's Randy Smith.
Rather than providing too much advance information or dumbing the challenge down, Smith argues for user-centered puzzles that provide "guidance on demand." He shows Tomb Raider and Portal puzzles as excellent examples that scale to the players' needs and provide more hints only if necessary.
In this presentation, Smith covers puzzle structure along with six principles of user-centered design: visibility, affordances, mapping, visual language, feedback, and conceptual models.
Check out the free video here.
Session Name: Helping Your Players Feel Smart: Puzzles as User Interface
Speaker(s): Randy Smith
Company Name(s): Tiger Style
Track / Format: Game DesignAbout the GDC VaultIn addition to this presentation, the GDC Vault offers numerous other free videos, audio recordings, and slides from many of the recent GDC events, and the service offers even more members-only content for GDC Vault subscribers. Those who purchased All Access passes to events like GDC, GDC Europe, and GDC China already have full access to GDC Vault, and interested parties can apply for the individual subscriptions via a GDC Vault inquiry form.
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Making the player feel smart by implying they figured it out is huge though, it's like the freeform combat in Batman Arkham Asylum. While you do need reasonably good timing and reactions to perform well, the majority of the combat looks far more impressive than the activity you are performing to initiate it. This leads to the player feeling/looking awesome. Equally if you solve a puzzle that required some leaps of faith and intuition seemingly on your own without guides or hints it can be very satisfying.
Also: Dark Messiah of Might & Magic....such a great, underrated game. Makes me sad it never got more attention.
My only complaint about Dark Messiah was the obvious ending, but I still had a blast playing it.
Who else is curious to see what a new game might look like with tech from id, world-building by Bethsoft, and systems-design by Arkane?
In fact wihtout the narrative this game wasn't even Sudoku level interaction.
This is really the problem, because of this commercial metriced methidology, there was nothing in this game to really actually test me.
Also there were 6 puzzles between both Portal 1 and 2 that even took longer than 5-10 minutes to figure out. The rest was just chasing cheese.
So despite all that effort I did get stuck a few times, and it was these puzzles that made the gameplay worth it. Had there not been at least those 6 puzzles one of which took me about 3-4 hours to figure out I would have balked the entire game ... but I get the impression you seem to think that is failure in game design when in fact it's the only mechanical enjoyment.
the primary descriptions make sense but I think this just comes back to having enough game play logic ... it's especially discouraging to see games designers that feel it's necessary to use ammo symbols on boxes forcing a particular path finding methodology, you have also undermined you're players prospect at learning to learn.. really at all.
I really believe this is a common sense error.
One of them I remember we solved it by timing our portals so we would collide mid-air, being launched from across map and fall down on the right platform. I'm not sure if this was the intended way or not, but I never found another puzzle that required a similar solution or built off that. My friend and I used to play climbing maps in CS, and were rather good at jumping mid-air around walls and and bunnyhopping. There was 1 or 2 levels we were able to circumvent by finding areas where we could jump and turn mid air around a wall.
Some people might argue that we weren't doing it the intended way but personally I find quite a bit of satisfaction in puzzles with multiple solutions, even if isn't intentionally designed that way.
I greatly enjoyed the freedom of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City for the same reason.... the ability to accomplish missions, sometimes by doing things the designer hadn't thought of: the flexibility and diversity of the game's systems allowed that kind of freedom.
Sometimes, walking through a game of scripted sequences can be a bit dull. Achieving goals in different way than the the designers intended is often more satisfying, and makes the player feel smarter.
Like Frank Sinatra says, "I did it my way" :)
Possibly showing my age but I cut my gaming teeth on games like Sierra's Quest for Glory series in which many puzzles were designed with different solutions, catering to fighter / thief / mage skills and playstyles.
Each alternate solution can make a game seem a bit less linear and a bit more interactive.