Dark Place Progress Post #10 (Patreon)

Hello, I've been playing a lot of games. Mainly I've spent the past week playing Lorelei And The Laser Eyes. It feels like Part 3 of a series of cryptic, fixed-camera-angle games I've played over the past year and a half: Signalis, Homebody, and now Lorelei.

Signalis has the most awesome world-building and presentation and unforgettable atmosphere and imagery, so it's still my favorite out of these even though its gameplay is pretty boring. Homebody's story was compelling until it fell totally flat, but we still had fun with it. Lorelei And The Laser Eyes probably goes right under Signalis (or MAYBE tied with it); my biggest hang-up with Lorelei And The Laser Eyes is that it just feels like a big escape room. But it still felt like a really substantial experience despite that. Once I accepted it for what it was, I did not want the experience to end.

That did get me thinking about what makes a puzzle game feel like a glorified escape room though. I have a few thoughts.

#1 is that the puzzles feel contrived. This happens when there's a lack of cohesion with the puzzles and the world the player inhabits. Like characters constantly going out of their way to write down encrypted codes and inventions that don't have a legit reason to exist (or a reason that I can buy into). Or for some reason every single thing has a stupid 9-digit keypad on it; and if you're in an ancient temple that can't have literal keypads, the 9-digit keypads just look different and have weird symbols on them.

#2 is that the puzzles boil down to a "key door key door key door" game design. There were some times in Lorelei And The Laser Eyes where I felt like I was steamrolling through puzzles, because the moment I got the "key", I knew exactly where it went to. And then that "key" (a date or random trivia) would be completely discarded and forgotten afterwards. That is okay if that's what you want; the best part of the game was when I felt like I was beginning to understand how the designer thinks, and I could almost solve a puzzle before I even saw what it was. The worst part was when I thought I could solve a "puzzle" and spent time working through it, only to later find that it's not even really a puzzle, because there's just a blatant code to it lying around somewhere else.

As a game designer, I've always kind of hated puzzles. Sometimes it feels to me like the most clever thing I can do as a puzzle designer is to add more and more levels of encryption to a code, more and more steps to untangle the solution. I hate that. That's not how you blow the player's mind. That's just giving them more work to do. But I still get easily stuck in that kind of thinking. And I think it's because of all this talk about puzzles.

There's a lot to learn from Outer Wilds, but this is the biggest thing I took from it: I will never, never make a puzzle game. I will create a mysterious world to study and discover, with its own rules and patterns. Then as the designer, my only work will be to add the clues and paths and pointers for the player to make revelations that are already baked into the world. Then I don't have to think about those dang puzzles!

Enough About Puzzles!

I've been adding a supermarket into Welcome To The Dark Place. I started using Twine as a part of my workflow since I haven't created a very friendly interface for connecting text nodes in Unity. I think I'll keep using it for dialogue, since dialogue trees can branch out very fast and get out of hand, yet I want to write them quickly and get into the flow without ever worrying about what connects to what.

I don't have a whole lot more to say. I am trying to pace myself and keep progress steady. This week has been slow for the project, but I'm not letting it stall out. For some reason I tend to get very bored by writing action or chase sequences. My testers have found them fun though, so I think it's just the process of writing them which is a slog for me. I'm not sure why.