Help with puzzle design

[Skunk]

Hey guys, I have finally gotten to a point in my game where I have a solid half hour of gameplay leading up to a dungeon.


I have mapped some of the dungeon so far but I am having a hard time coming up with ideas for puzzles.


I have figured out the push and switch puzzles, and the slidy rock puzzles and what not.


But I am thinking I wanna try something a little different and not so typical.


Can anyone help me design some decent puzzles?


(My dungeon is an entrance to an inner earth if that changes anything)

 

[mlogan]

I would start by thinking about puzzles you enjoy and seeing how you can adapt them to work. For example, I've always loved doing these sorts logic puzzles and so for my IGMC entry a couple of years ago, I featured one an worked out a way that the player could walk around to mark answers.

 

[Skunk]

Now that is an original idea  I am seeing how I can implement this!

 

[mlogan]

Specifically the way I did it was, because it was a futuristic setting, I use a "holograph room" as the setting. I used some custom graphics and events to make it work. http://i.imgur.com/yV4OeQZ.png

 

[Skunk]

That almost reminds me something from a wicked total recall rpg lol


Did you use any specific script? or just some ingenius eventing?


I will be honest, I think this might be a little above my ability level at the moment


It does look really damn cool though.


you know how we have a yanfly action sequence thread for tips and tricks?


Is there one for people to share puzzle ideas as well?

 

[Prescott]

Take a look at the puzzles in the Silent Hill games. Very unique puzzle design and although they are horror games, you can definitely make a bunch of them fit to your needs and put some twists on them. Shadow puzzles, math puzzles, etc. Shattered Memories had a cool idea with needing to enter phone numbers on the in-game phone to get the "answer" to a puzzle that was really usually just another riddle you had to solve to figure out the real answer.


Something we are incorporating into our game is a shifting wall puzzle in the catacombs. Pressing switches shifts a bunch of walls in the dungeon and you have to do them in the right order otherwise you can get crushed or have to start over. We also have another one where you need to look into mirrors in a haunted mansion to be teleported somewhere else in the mansion so you can go to another mirror and that's how you progress.


Make sure the players kind of knows what they're doing though. It should rarely be something blind and frustrating. One particular example that pops into my head is not from a video game but the movie As Above So Below. The characters are stuck in a room and must remove the correct rock from the wall otherwise everything will collapse and kill them. There is a hint as to what rock it might be, and it's related to the number of planets, so they immediately think it's 8, but then realize that it's an old document and back then there were only 5 known planets, but then the moon and sun also counted as planets, so the answer is 7. Cryptic hints and riddles like this are great because it forces the player to think without it just being "arrange these parts here" or "solve this math equation." Just make sure it flows well and doesn't appear forced, it should probably have something to do with the lore of your game or the situation they are currently in. I'm guilty of including the question 'Who is the President of the United States" back in a game I made in 2006. Definitely nothing to do with the game.


Hope I could help you in some way  definitely check out some puzzles from horror games, they tend to have the best ones for some reason. Legend of Zelda is alright for puzzles, but they're mostly the same thing you have to do in every dungeon, just in a different way than you did in the last one and with a different item. Those kinds of puzzles are fine of course, but if you want your game to be a puzzle adventure or something like that, you're gonna' have to think a bit deeper

 

[Anthony Xue]

(My dungeon is an entrance to an inner earth if that changes anything)

An entrance to an inner earth? You mean like a hollow world? Well, I'll simply assume then that it's a cavern passage through the crust of the world. If this is not the case, the puzzle is easily adaptable; it should also be pretty easy to implement.


Party enters the cavern, finds a locked portal with a statue standing a few paces away. Portal has no obvious opening mechanism. Party investigates the statue, party's clever guy comments: "Hmmm. There is a plaque on the statue, but after all these years, it's barely readable. But I think it says something like <I am what this place is made of; let my brothers say my name.> Strange."


Then our heroes discover a room nearby filled with five statues identical to the one before the portal. When they interact with those statues, they notice that each of them has a stone dial implemented into its chest which can be turned to one of four letters (fitting the standard RPG Maker choice with four options). These letters are:


(1st statue)  - S - Y - Z - E


(2nd statue) - A - T - C - D


(3rd statue) - P - O - J - R


(4th statue) - T - N - W - I


(5th statue) - V - E - H - L


So what is a cave made of? If you line the letters up like this, I think the solution "STONE" is not too difficult to find. Set the dials appropriately and the portal opens.


Now for more fun: There is also the solution "EARTH" hidden, which would fit the cave as well. You can either leave this as a simple alternate method or have "EARTH", which is more difficult to find, open not only the portal, but a small secret passage to a bonus chest nearby. Or have it open only that secret passage, so the mechanism must be used two times for optimal results.


This puzzle can easily be changed to work with any other words, maybe the names of gods. The dials might also display numbers, gemstones or whatever you can bring into a logical chain. But since this seems to be rather close to the beginning (half an hour of gameplay), I think simple letters suffice here.

 

[mlogan]

Did you use any specific script? or just some ingenius eventing?


Is there one for people to share puzzle ideas as well?

Eventing. I don't remember details, as it's been two years ago, but most of it really wasn't overly complicated. Mostly giving choices and storing variables. I don't have time atm, but I'll try to look later and see exactly what I did. Heck, maybe even write a tutorial for it.


As for the topic, not sure but there might be. I know people have definitely asked about them before, so I would go to General Discussion or maybe Game Mechanics and put puzzles in the search box and then use the drop down menu to select "this forum".

 

[Wavelength]

Party enters the cavern, finds a locked portal with a statue standing a few paces away. Portal has no obvious opening mechanism. Party investigates the statue, party's clever guy comments: "Hmmm. There is a plaque on the statue, but after all these years, it's barely readable. But I think it says something like <I am what this place is made of; let my brothers say my name.> Strange."


Then our heroes discover a room nearby filled with five statues identical to the one before the portal. When they interact with those statues, they notice that each of them has a stone dial implemented into its chest which can be turned to one of four letters (fitting the standard RPG Maker choice with four options). These letters are:


(1st statue)  - S - Y - Z - E


(2nd statue) - A - T - C - D


(3rd statue) - P - O - J - R


(4th statue) - T - N - W - I


(5th statue) - V - E - H - L


So what is a cave made of? If you line the letters up like this, I think the solution "STONE" is not too difficult to find. Set the dials appropriately and the portal opens.


Now for more fun: There is also the solution "EARTH" hidden, which would fit the cave as well. You can either leave this as a simple alternate method or have "EARTH", which is more difficult to find, open not only the portal, but a small secret passage to a bonus chest nearby. Or have it open only that secret passage, so the mechanism must be used two times for optimal results.

This is a really good idea for a puzzle - a clever, well-themed clue and even a nifty "bonus solution".


Let me just preach for a moment about player friendliness.  When you're making a puzzle like this - or like the logic puzzles mlogan described - or pretty much any puzzle that a player could possibly get stuck on (but especially ones like this where language barriers can screw a player), the nicest thing you can do for your player is to give them an "out" of some sort.  Using the above puzzle as an example, maybe after each wrong answer the room shakes a little, and after X number of wrong guesses one of the walls caves (destroying the puzzle), and out comes a stone golem you have to battle against.  After you beat the golem, the caved wall leads to an alternate route to the end of the dungeon that contains less treasure than the main route.  You can also have party members try to "think through" the puzzle with you after two or three wrong guesses, giving the player hints that you might want to try to spell a word with the five letters in order, or specifically noting something like "hmmm... what is this place made of?"


Because if the player doesn't catch on to the concept of the puzzle (this happens more than you'd expect), or to the meaning of the original clue, and there are no "outs" or additional help, then the player is left with only three options:

• Try every single combination until one works (with 4^5 = 1024 possible combinations, your player will have to attempt an average of >500 tries before lucking into a solution)
  
• Find an FAQ with the answer (not only seriously immersion-breaking, but also not available for a lot of small RPG Maker games)
  
• Quit playing your game and move onto something more player-friendly