Category: interactive fiction

Learning about Multiplayer Puzzle Design from Escape Rooms

I’m standing on a London street across from a scrap metal recycling establishment, in front of a door with no sign except a cryptic symbol. I’ve been told I will only be admitted if I press the buzzer at exactly the right time. A stranger asks me whether I’ve “had experiences like this” before.

I have, unless the stranger means “have you ever ridden the London Overground before this evening,” in which case the answer is no. We are a little outside my comfort zone there. But there are no Tube stops in this part of town.

Screen Shot 2016-06-02 at 6.00.03 PM

Time Run: the Lance of Longinus is a London escape room. There is an hour of gameplay, but if you count in brief and debrief time, it will take a good chunk of two hours to complete. We played with a team of four, which is the recommended number. They will let you play with three or five, but there were several of the puzzles that I think would have been just a bit more tricky to do with three (and fully impossible with two, so that’s fair enough). It was excellent fun; the team came out fairly psyched up and energized, and immediately talking about finding another escape room to do together.

I’d also say that, except for the travel to get to London in the first place, escape rooms turn out to fit my lifestyle surprisingly well: the gameplay itself is self-contained and memorable, it doesn’t take 60 hours to get a full experience, it doesn’t rely on reflexes I don’t have, and I’m less likely to get stuck than when playing a graphical adventure. No prep is required. It’s also a playful social experience with sufficient structure that you don’t need to Do Smalltalk, and enough adrenaline and excitement that you do build a sense of connection with the rest of your group. It doesn’t tend to involve the level of creativeness and emotional risk-taking that you see in storygaming, so it’s suitable to do with people you don’t yet know super-well, and it doesn’t require as much energy.

As with the previous escape game I played, it would be bad form to go into too much detail: a lot of the fun of an experience like this is in the discovery, and I won’t describe the puzzles or much about the format. But to speak very broadly, I felt that the individual puzzles in Longinus were a bit less difficult than in Enter the Oubliette, and the narrative frame less stressful. In Oubliette, you have to ask for hints when you’re ready for them; in Time Run, there’s a constant line open to a hint-giver who will nudge you along if you seem to be missing something, and we spent less time actively stuck. The “run” in Time Run doesn’t refer to any actual physical activity, but the game does keep up a pretty good pace, with new puzzle content reveals happening on a regular basis. Conversely, less of what you see in Time Run is there to help flesh out characters or develop the fiction of the surrounding world. None of this is a criticism of either Oubliette or Time Run — just a difference in flavor.

Perhaps in exchange for their non-central location, Time Run’s organizers have plenty of space at their disposal, and they make good use of it. The game uses some quite large-scale props, and a few puzzles that would be cramped in a smaller setting. The whole space, including the intro and exit rooms, has been imaginatively set-dressed, but in a way that doesn’t overload the team with red herrings. At the end, you get a score card for your team, and it’s printed on thick linen-finish stock with gold stamping. There are no actors in the escape rooms themselves, but there are several at intro and outro, and possibly more staff we didn’t see working levers behind the scenes while we played. The whole experience feels deluxe, which reflects the ticket prices, a few pounds more than average for a game of this type.

Multiple activities in the course of the game were adventure game-style puzzles that I have never seen executed in real life before. I won’t say what my favorite was, but I will say that when our team found it, there was a certain amount of incredulous, appreciative laughter that someone had *actually* built this setup.

I found this fascinating from a game design perspective. Escape rooms generally and Time Run in particular are very much multiplayer puzzle games, and we have so few of those in the IF space that it’s worth digging in for guidance wherever we can find that. Some thoughts, based on the grand total of two escape rooms I’ve done so far:

Continue reading “Learning about Multiplayer Puzzle Design from Escape Rooms”

End of May Link Assortment

Upcoming events

June 2-4, it’s Feral Vector in Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire. I will be there, talking about interactive narrative. Many other people will be there as well.

June 2, 7 PM, you can hear Matt Sheridan Smith talk about his game You Can’t See Any Such Thing in Brooklyn.

June 4, 1 PM, the SF Bay IF group meets.

June 14, 7 PM, the Oxford-London IF Meetup is meeting in London at the Failbetter headquarters to talk about IF and other media.

June 23, the Oxford Festival of the Arts includes some general game content and (at 7 PM) a panel with various Oxford-based indie games folks. Not specifically an IF event, but likely to include some interactive narrative components.

Upcoming Comps and Jams

Discworld Open Jam runs through July 28, and welcomes any works inspired by or set in Discworld.

June 18-25th, I’m running Bring Out Your Dead. Do you have a work-no-longer-in-progress that is gorgeously broken? Massively overambitious? Too niche to finish? Bring it, lay it on the pyre, let us gaze upon its face.

The rational explanation: good science looks at failures as well as successes. This is a chance to learn from one another’s quirky experiments and colorful failures, extremes of interaction that just didn’t work in practice, and other items that the IF community might find archaeologically interesting.

The emotional explanation: sometimes it feels like the hard drive is filling up with unfinished, unfinishable things, and it gets in the way. This is a chance at midsummer, before the height of comp season, to make a final use of those items and clear them out of the way, leaving mental space for the projects that are still viable.

Post-mortem comments and author notes are welcome, and so is checking out and commenting on other people’s work.

New Releases

Robin Johnson’s entertaining choice-parser hybrid Draculaland is now available as an app for Android.

Hadean Lands is coming to Steam, and will become available June 20. There is also DLC! Namely, a certificate in which you swear to solve the game without hints. I can’t decide whether this is genius or cruelty.

And this is not a new release, but Daniel Stelzer’s puzzle-rich Scroll Thief has received significant updates to puzzles. If you haven’t played it (and possibly if you have), now might be a good time to look.

Craft

Failbetter editor Olivia Wood gave a VideoBrains talk about sex writing in games and its pitfalls — with particular attention to Sunless Sea.

[ed. portion redacted.]

Elsewhere

IF author Caleb Wilson (Lime Ergot, Starry Seeksorrow, The Northnorth Passage, and others) has a short story coming out in this Swords v. Cthulhu anthology.

Bring Out Your Dead

BoyD

Bring Out Your Dead is an event I am running over solstice, June 18 to June 25th. It is not exactly a jam and certainly not a competition, but rather an opportunity to purge old experiments and share what was interesting about them. For purposes of organizational convenience, though, it’s being treated as an itch.io jam. Here’s the text I’ve written for it:

Bring Out Your Dead is an event for sharing dead WIPs and experiments that you don’t expect to finish, but that you’d like to show to someone anyway. It’s a chance to cleanse your hard drive, move on from old ideas, and salvage some learning from things that didn’t work out. It’s also an opportunity for your community to learn from your mistakes — which can be just as useful as learning from a success. Ambitious follies, bizarre experiments, toys, and notions that in retrospect never had a chance — all are welcome.

You are also welcome, and indeed encouraged, to provide some context about your work. What were you trying to achieve? What do you think is most or least successful about what you did? Why did you ultimately decide to abandon the project? Are there things you think others could learn from the project?

There is no ranking in this jam: it’s not about competition and judgments. However, discussion is welcome, especially if you find something in someone’s entry that sparks your imagination.

To participate, you need only contribute items at the itch.io jam page during the time the jam is live. You are welcome to put in things that are not typical IF, if you wish.

I am mentioning this in advance because I know some people have already started thinking about what they want to contribute, but you do not have to put any special effort in, and indeed the initial point was to minimize special effort.

Not All Choice Interfaces Are Alike

I tend to write here about choice-based games as though they were all the same kind of thing, but that’s a perspective that very much comes from a history with parser IF and a tendency to distinguish clicking from typing. And I will freely admit that a few years ago I was pretty obtuse myself about the differences between types of interface option.

In fact there are many kinds of input methods for communicating the player’s decisions in a story, and many possible or actual variants, some of which allow the player to type a keyword from a set list, or search from among hidden choices by typing, or perform parser-like commands by pushing menu buttons. Seen in this light, the parser is part of a continuum with other input methods, not uniquely distinct from them.

Much has already been written, of course, about controllers and input for games. See for instance Tracy Fullerton’s Game Design Workshop for a detailed discussion of control design in general. And people continue to experiment, as in this alt controller jam. However, most of these focus on non-text-based or non-narrative games.

Here I’m going to discuss several input methods for text-based and/or highly narrative-focused games according to the following metrics:

How much effort is it? How expressive is it? How ambiguous is it? How discoverable is it? How much pressure is there? How much is the player required to embody the actions of the protagonist? 

This is not the same as studying the verb set of the resulting games.

Continue reading “Not All Choice Interfaces Are Alike”

Writing Interactive Fiction With Twine (Melissa Ford)

WritingInteractiveFictionA curious and fascinating thing about Melissa Ford’s Writing Interactive Fiction with Twine is how it combines hypertext craft advice and Twine syntax tutorials with design expectations largely derived from parser-based interactive fiction.

This is a 400 page book about Twine fiction whose index lists Anna Anthropy once (in a passage discussing how she did geographical description in one of her games) and Porpentine never — though it does refer, without attribution, to the tiny Twine jam Porpentine ran. Steve Meretzky and Brian Moriarty appear, but not Michael Lutz or Tom McHenry or A. DeNiro or Caelyn Sandel or Dietrich Squinkifer, nor Michael Joyce or Shelley Jackson or other luminaries from the literary hypertext tradition either. The book has early and prominent chapters about how to design puzzles, inventory, and a room layout; fonts, text transitions, and CSS effects come quite a bit later, despite being much more common than inventory systems in practice. The section on genres starts with a helpful definition of the word “genre,” then runs through bite-sized descriptions of some common fiction genres — rather than, say, trying to describe the range of genres represented in current Twine fiction. The section on story structure explains terms such as “climax” and “exposition” from scratch, assuming essentially no writing-workshop-style experience from the reader.

This writing style, along with the tendency to draw examples from Narnia and Harry Potter, suggests that the author intends the book to be accessible to younger users as well as adults. It would probably be a bit over the head of most young children, but I could picture a motivated tween handling it just fine. Possibly that accounts for a decision not to explore much of the most innovative content for which Twine has been used. If you’ve read Videogames for Humans, almost none of what you saw there is replicated or even mentioned in this book.

Continue reading “Writing Interactive Fiction With Twine (Melissa Ford)”

Plot-shaped Level Design

Periodically I find myself giving the same advice to new story-game designers, and I’ve been repeating it a good bit lately, so I’m writing it down here, though I’m sure many of my readers are already familiar with it:

Your job is to make it as hard as possible for the player to finish your game without understanding your story.

I don’t say “make it impossible” because you cannot control for a player who, say, is not completely fluent in the language of your story playing it on a glitchy mobile device three vodkas into a transatlantic flight. It’s possible for anything to be misunderstood. But the aim is for a person playing in good faith and with full capacity to be guaranteed a complete story.

This means that the player must encounter, and ideally make use of, every critical piece of information in the story. “Encounter” might mean “read on screen” or “hear in dialogue” or “see in a cut scene,” but encountering information is much less valuable in an interactive context than using information. So it’s best if the player needs to act on each of those critical beats.

To design for this, start by identifying critical beats. What are the facts the reader has to know in order to understand this story?

This is a subset, probably a very small subset, of all the facts the reader could know. Many world-building details and secondary character motivations can probably be omitted without ruining the experience. But if your story’s impact depends on the player learning the protagonist’s secret motives, then that information is vital.

If there are two (or more) possible endings to the story, each ending might require a different set of plot beats to work fully. (It’s long in the tooth now, but my 2006 game Floatpoint lets the player make an important diplomatic decision that can turn out any of a number of ways; however, in order to get the puzzle materials required to communicate a particular choice, the player has to experience vignettes that are relevant to that outcome. This was an attempt to guarantee that each ending hit all of its critical beats.)

Figure out which information is vital. Make a list. Be honest with yourself and keep the list as short as possible.

You might find yourself getting bogged down in minutiae that have nothing to do with your major themes and characters. (“I’ve worked out this really clever escape for the killer and there are 9 different fiddly things the player needs to understand in order to get it…”) If you find yourself in that situation, you need to streamline, find some emotional reason why those beats are interesting, or — if the whole fun of the thing really is an enormous logic puzzle — structure your game/story so it’s just that one puzzle. That can totally work — see Toby’s Nose, Oxygen, Orevore Courier, Rematch, and arguably Her Story. But don’t get precious. If something isn’t working, save it for next time.

Once you have your list of vital data, figure out dependencies. Which facts depend on other facts to make sense? Which facts have the greatest impact if they come after other facts? If learning the protagonist’s secret motive is more effective after we see them commit a crime, that provides a motivation for ordering. Turn your list into a dependency chart.

Next: this chart you made that looks strangely like a classic puzzle dependency chart or level design chart? It is one! Assign puzzles, geographical barriers, stat dependencies, or choice flows that match the shape of the plot chart. Theme accordingly. If your story requires the player to see the crime before learning the motive, gate the reveal of the motive with a puzzle that can only be solved with information from the crime, or place it in a room that can only be reached by passing through the space where the crime is committed.

This method still applies to choice-based narrative. For a nodal choice game, you have a lot more control over how the player moves through your story than you would in an open world game, for instance, but some of the same points apply when it comes to focusing player attention. If you have a key story beat, don’t just narrate it and move on. Players skim in interactive stories, especially in choice-based stories where they know they’ll be able to keep moving forward regardless of how well they learned the establishing details.

If you need the player to remember something, give them a choice about that thing. If you can’t let them choose whether the thing happens, you can still let them choose how it happens, or how the protagonist feels about it, or what they’re able to salvage from it.