Structural elements vs. puzzles
In James Bond: Everything or Nothing there’s a 2-player cooperative mission mode. Throughout the mission there are doors with two buttons; both buttons must be pressed at the same time for the...
View ArticleNatural action
My use of “structural elements” to name things that are actions but not really puzzles was a bit of a hack. I meant that those elements were working as structure, rather than something to “stump” the...
View ArticleCategories of interactive fiction
Find a pack of cards. Take a card at random. Replace, shuffle well, draw again. If you get the Queen of Spades twice in a row, you are born dead. Go to 0. — Kim Newman, Life’s Lottery I have been...
View ArticleSoup cans
Cliff Johnson’s game The Fool’s Errand contains puzzles — word searches, jigsaw puzzles, and so forth — that are separate from any narrative. 7th Guest is game infamous for a puzzle involving soup...
View ArticleFatalism
Zankage isn’t the answer to this one. — Carl Muckenhoupt, The Gostak Samuel T. Denton’s Endgame, the winner of the C32 Contest from last year, had a particular bit that impressed me. I’m going to...
View ArticleConversational cutscenes
A long-held charge against conversation menus is that they are modified cutscenes of sorts — infodumps where the player will pick every choice given to avoid missing anything. Take the following, for...
View ArticleTelling ambiguity
So, as Sean Barrett points out in my last post, I botched considering the possibilities of TELL in the ASK/TELL system to break out of conversation as a mere series of questions. Adding TELL makes...
View ArticleMissing history
Quiz time: what game is being referred to in these quotes? In essence, the animals would do to each other anything that they could do to or with you. So we would constantly have animals interacting in...
View ArticleDesigning multiplayer puzzles
Let it be said: multiplayer puzzles are hard. Back at my first post I discuss how a puzzle where two players push buttons simultaneously is changed into a natural action. However, sadly, such a setup...
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