The first issue was providing enough fun. Every puzzle should have some reward, and a complicated or multi-stage puzzle should provide some minor rewards for partial solutions. So once I had the puzzle structure in mind (more about that later), I could see which puzzles were going to open a lot of new game-play and which were only going to bring the player up against another puzzle — the structural equivalent of getting through one locked door to find that there’s another beyond it. Everywhere there was a puzzle without much game-play reward, I added plot material for the player to discover instead — ideally, a hint that raised more questions than it answered, something that would both reward him for getting part-way through the puzzle sequence and keep him interested in what would turn up next.
The other point had to do with managing player attention. The more time a player spends in the presence of an unsolvable puzzle (say, a door he can see from the first room but that stays locked until half-way through the game), the more importance he tends to attach to that problem. It’s a huge let-down to walk through that door and find that it leads to a broom closet with one cheap treasure in it. So the big puzzles, the puzzles the player has been taught to care about, should pay off in multiple ways at once: *both* major new game-play *and* major plot information. —Emily Short interviewed by Jim Munroe —Inside Interactive Fiction: An Interview with Emily Short (Gamasutra)
Inside Interactive Fiction: An Interview with Emily Short
Surprise sidewalk encounter with my man Hopkins outside the Admin shuttle stop this mornin...
This is what the techbros are excited about? Really?
Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever
New infographic to help our graduating English majors make sense of their capstone project...
Pushing and pulling vertices. Components that fit together perfectly when I model them in ...
Double Entry Journals: Your Scholarly Research Notes for College-level Critical Thinking