Detective Game Design Problems | Hacker News Reader

Detective Game Design Problems

digitales.games

44 pointsjsnell15 comments

Paper and Pen RPG writer Kenneth Hite had an insight: finding clues is not interesting. Not finding clues can derail everything. So make finding the clues easy, then let the player concentrate on the important part: what to do with the clues.

It does irk me how brainless puzzles in games have become. Two games that come to mind are Skyrim (where the puzzles you face are basically "rotate these stones until they match what is shown above them on the wall") and Drake's Fortune (upon encountering a puzzle, the protagonist immediately says "hmm, this looks familiar" and insists you open up your journal where he has been sketching the exact solution between gunfights).

Designed to ensure everyone can progress while still feeling like they/their character achieved something I guess, but yes certainly a lot of room for improvement.

I didn't play much of Skyrim, were there no optional harder puzzles/investigations?

Only briefly mentioned in the article, Return of the Obra Dinn is a must play.

There are a few whodunnit quests (https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/Blood_on_the_Ice or https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/Canvas_the_Castle) but they're not exactly difficult.

Puzzles in The Outer Wilds were interesting, if you're not too allergic to a few specific bad sci fi tropes.

https://the-spoiler.com/RPG/Dynamix/betrayal.at.krondor.1.ht...

     Buckets, barrels, baskets, cans;
     What must you fill with empty hands?

...not I18N-able, requires some thought, but really satisfying when you can get the answer.

I would have guessed “gloves”, but that’s i18n-able

The particular cadence and a near-rhyme of the riddle are hard to translate. An expression like "empty hands" may not work. You could get a confusing literal translation, or an uninteresting question stripped of its poetic quality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Ton_beau_de_Marot

I'm working on my own detective game right now; inspired by all the things I hated of past detective games, especially around dialogue systems (they always present questions to ask which I have no frame of reference for) as well as the general mechanics (a lot of detective games focus on being a cinematic experience, with most of the mechanics being unrelated and inconsistent with each other). L.A. Noire is probably the worst offender in my head (even though I enjoy it as a game in general).

Pretty cool this article came out now, just as I started to get back into the swing of building my game.

Return of the Obra Dinn is probably one of the best detective games out there and I'm really sad there is no replay value in it - it has been the only game to actually make me feel like a Sherlock Holmes persona, while deducing things.

This video from Game Maker’s Toolkit is an excellent overview of the topic: https://youtu.be/gwV_mA2cv_0

I wonder if you could implement adaptive difficulty: Hints gradually becoming more obvious over time; initial hint level for new challenges adaptive to how much you needed them in the past.

Tex Murphy are pretty well designed detective games.

Only do myst and finding the clues are not that ease.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com