[seanwilson]

Hi Scott! Do you have any thoughts on how hard it is to come up with original adventure game puzzles and what your process is here?

When I was looking at this once, I noticed there's a lot of puzzles that are shared between recent adventure games that you can find in older adventure games too e.g. screwdriver + screws, rusty door + oil, distract an NPC so you can steal something. Instead of this being from lack of originality, I think instead there's some limits on how many puzzle like this exist because they have to be common sense + not completely obvious + involve physical object manipulation + use common objects. I think this is one of the reasons a lot of recent adventure games and escape room games devolve into doors with abstract logic problems to unlock them. Alternatively, they need to introduce new mechanics to widen the design space, like adding time travel or magic.

[ScottAdams]

My process has always been one of inspiration from a higher power.

I would place a location, think of obvious items for the locations and then pretend I was there. What would I try to do and why? Then I would sit and think about it.

I also enjoyed putting it in front of beta testers and seeing what new and unique things they might try that I would want to incorporate into the game.

A big tip of the hat to Neil Novak one of my classic game testers from whom I got a lot of great inspiration!

As far as new puzzles go I hope you try the new section I wrote for Adventureland XL. I have a large number of new puzzles and one that I am especially happy with that went in a direction I hadn't done before.

To get into the XL section of Adventureland you do first need to complete the base game and it has changed a bit with a few new puzzles of its own. You can never loose so don't ever start over. Just keep playing and let me know what you think :)

[anthk]

Most of IF games have puzzless very different from the ones from the graphical adventures as the text medium can set really complex interactions.

Check out All Things Devour and Vicious Cycles, both have time travel mechanics.

[seanwilson]

> Most of IF games have puzzless very different from the ones from the graphical adventures as the text medium can set really complex interactions.

I used to think this but do you think most text adventures wouldn't work as graphical adventures? Most text adventure puzzles I see are "USE X ON Y" (or the verb required is obvious), nothing complex, the same as graphical adventures. I think All Things Devours would work, except it might have to be turn based.

> Check out All Things Devour and Vicious Cycles, both have time travel mechanics.

Are there good examples without time travel, magic, cartoon logic, sci-fi etc.? My theory is something like this has to be introduced because there just aren't enough interesting "USE X ON Y" style puzzles that haven't been seen before or are too silly/obscure e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_hair_mustache_puzzle.

[framsberg]

How about The Edifice, which won the XYZZY Award for Best Puzzles and for Best Individual Puzzle?

https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=4tb9soabrb4apqzd

The puzzle that won it the Best Individual Puzzle award in one where you need to learn enough of a foreign (invented) language to ask a person for critical information.

[seanwilson]

This seems like another one that has to include a unique mechanic on top of common object manipulation to make the latter more interesting? I'll look at it more closely though.

I know of https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=aearuuxv83plclpl and https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=w5s3sv43s3p98v45 that use language and wordplay as well.

[framsberg]

Well this is far from wordplay.

I don't get what you think makes a text adventure puzzle less worthy.

A puzzle should work well in the medium that it's presented. A complicated math puzzle that you suddenly need to solve in Call of Duty is pretty useless. A puzzle where you need to recognize patterns in an image, presented in a text adventure where the image is just described in (many) words is equally bad. A puzzle in a text adventure that's about words and language seems like a great fit.

[seanwilson]

I'm probably not making myself clear. Thanks for the examples and all these text adventures are very worthy showcases of good puzzles that take advantage of the medium in a clever way, and modern IF games are really cool.

My pondering is about how far you can take text adventure design if the designer _intentionally limits themselves_ to object manipulation puzzles based in the real world. My feeling was early text adventures explored this to a limit, which is why all the interesting modern IF examples usually have some twist or layer on top. I'm not saying that's a bad thing either, I just find understanding the limits of how far you can push a certain design restriction interesting.

Specifically, I was looking into if you could get a computer to randomly generate interesting text adventure puzzles by feeding it metadata on common objects and how they interact. My feeling eventually was this was unlikely to generate something surprising as it needs more layers.

I'm really interested to see more text adventure games that push complex NPC interactions (The Edifice looks like a great example, thanks!) as most e.g. movies, TV shows and book plots are based around characters interacting and manipulating each other, over interacting with objects.

[anthk]

EDIT: wrong parent.

On the text adventure puzzles, most people began with Zork, so they arent used to modern IF made with Inform against the Z-Machine, were text puzzless can be far from use x on y.