I’m currently designing a detective game (yes, after nearly a decade of little or no AGS-activity), and have thought a bit about how to implement deductive reasoning in the advancement of the game.
What models have you encountered that you really like?
Usually the player will see/hear the character draw his/her own conclusions based on finding or combining inventory items. This means that even highly “logic-propelled†games can be solved by trial-and-error clicking on stuff, until you’ve stumbled upon the proper trigger to forward the plot.
Puzzles in these games are typically confined to very isolated events (escaping a room) or finding hidden objects, while the reasoning itself takes place through protagonist monologues (“aha, that’s why the butler couldn’t have done it!â€) or even entire cut-scenes.
I know some designers have explored a middle way by using notes and memories as inventory items; these items can be combined and examined to yield new clues. But how can I give the task of actually drawing the conclusions entirely to the player?
If the game universe was completely open, like some kind of ultimate GTA-like sandbox model, and every door could be lockpicked, every NPC interrogated, shadowed, threatened and eventually arrested and brought to jail, then all this wouldn’t be an issue. The game would simply end when the culprit was behind bars, and you’d be rewarded for it.
But with a finite number of locations and options, you still need to “steer†the player. How can you unlock a location based solely on the player’s own incentive to visit it? How can you give the player the opportunity to suspect a character, without telling him explicitly that the character in question is suspicious?
How can you give the player the opportunity to say “but Alice would never have tasted the poisoned T-bone steak, because Alice is a vegan!†without using memories or notes as inventory items (which could hypothetically be tried by just clicking around randomly)?
What models have you encountered that you really like?
Usually the player will see/hear the character draw his/her own conclusions based on finding or combining inventory items. This means that even highly “logic-propelled†games can be solved by trial-and-error clicking on stuff, until you’ve stumbled upon the proper trigger to forward the plot.
Puzzles in these games are typically confined to very isolated events (escaping a room) or finding hidden objects, while the reasoning itself takes place through protagonist monologues (“aha, that’s why the butler couldn’t have done it!â€) or even entire cut-scenes.
I know some designers have explored a middle way by using notes and memories as inventory items; these items can be combined and examined to yield new clues. But how can I give the task of actually drawing the conclusions entirely to the player?
If the game universe was completely open, like some kind of ultimate GTA-like sandbox model, and every door could be lockpicked, every NPC interrogated, shadowed, threatened and eventually arrested and brought to jail, then all this wouldn’t be an issue. The game would simply end when the culprit was behind bars, and you’d be rewarded for it.
But with a finite number of locations and options, you still need to “steer†the player. How can you unlock a location based solely on the player’s own incentive to visit it? How can you give the player the opportunity to suspect a character, without telling him explicitly that the character in question is suspicious?
How can you give the player the opportunity to say “but Alice would never have tasted the poisoned T-bone steak, because Alice is a vegan!†without using memories or notes as inventory items (which could hypothetically be tried by just clicking around randomly)?
