Point and Click Puzzle Design

Hi, this is Mark Brown with Game Maker's Toolkit, a series on video game design. A few months back I played Broken Age - the point and click adventure from Double Fine that raised 3 million bucks on Kickstarter, and became so bloated that it was released in two halves, almost a year apart. I generally enjoyed Broken Age's first half. It's funny and charming, and I liked both of the main characters. There's Vella, who is an unwilling sacrificial offering to a monster. And Shay, who wants to break free of his mollycoddling parents.

But when the second half came out earlier this year, I started to find puzzles that had some seriously troubling design. Like the puzzle where this grabby hand is obsessed with boots: VELLA: Wow! It really seems to like boots. But doesn't seem to care about Vella's shoes: VELLA: It doesn't seem interested in me, or my clothing. Or the one where these girls say they need food, but Vella just won't give them this taco pill: VELLA: I don't wanna touch that pill until I know what it is. Could be space poison.

Or the puzzle that you solve by doing absolutely nothing, or this baffling knot puzzle that's more like a Rorschach test. And then there's the puzzle that almost made me quit me the game for good. There's this bit where Vella needs to figure out the right pattern to sew into this space scarf. But the correct solution is not somewhere else on the spaceship. It's not in Vella's story at all - it's actually hidden deep within Shay's story.

That's despite the fact that in act one, there are zero puzzles that rely on information gleaned from the other kid's story. And despite the fact that you're never told to expect such puzzles in act two. And despite the fact that these two kids don't know each other and can't communicate with one another in any way. Its unfair, unreasonable, and - I say - poorly designed. Which is par for the course with point and click adventures, right? These games are filled with pixel hunting and moon logic and impossible conundrums.

Like the notorious puzzle in Gabriel Knight 3 where you have to use masking tape and maple syrup to turn cat hair into a fake moustache, so you can impersonate a guy who doesn't even have a moustache. You have to draw some facial hair on his stolen passport with a marker pen. Yes, point and click adventures had stuff like. Stuff that was indefensibly dumb. But I don't think a few bad apples should doom an entire genre.

Especially a genre that has given us some of the best stories in gaming history, and definitely some of the best jokes. A genre that moves at a different pace to many others, and offers more grounded, Macgyver-style puzzles than the sort of abstract fare you find in a game like Portal or Antichamber. So, instead of always beating on stupid point and click puzzles - which would be easy, because there are a LOT of them - let's look at some golden rules that can be used to make a good, responsibly-designed puzzle. Maybe we can help save this genre from the scrap heap.

Rule one is to provide clear goals. Before you even get to the puzzles, players need to know what they're doing. They should always know what their short and long term goals are, so they know which puzzles to solve, and have the motivation to do so. In bonkers comedy Day of the Tentacle, for example, we know that our long term goal is to get stranded time travelers Laverne and Hoagie back to Bernard's time in the present.

BERNARD: Well, hurry up and bring them back. DR. FRED: I will, as soon as I get a new diamond. Then all your buddies have to do is plug in their respective chrono-johns and... BERNARD: Plug them in?! Which means Laverne needs to get into the basement LAVERNE: I can see Doctor Fred's old lab, and his generator is still there. Gee I could really use that power. And we know this means getting into that grandfather clock and past that purple tentacle, which is our new short term goal.

This might seem obvious, but you'd be surprised how many adventure games mess this up and leave players directionless, trying to solve puzzles for no good reason. LucasArts would often give multiple goals at the same time, so players can go work on something else if they get stuck on one of the puzzles. MAUREEN: The front forks are wasted so you'll have to get some new ones. And someone stole my welding torch. And last but not least, I patched up your ruptured gas tank but you're out of fuel and I don't have any.

BLUE TENTACLE: Entrants will be judged in three categories: best smile, best hair, and best laugh. SOPHIA: You'll need all three stones if you want to find Atlantis. BEN: Where am I supposed to find all this stuff? MAUREEN: You can hack it, tough guy. Rule two is signposting. Once a player starts working on a puzzle, the single most important thing an adventure can do is provide clear signposting. Anybody who says that adventure games are about trying to guess what's in the designer's brain, obviously isn't paying attention. The best point and clicks are littered with clues that tell you what to do, often by looking at objects or talking to characters.

So in Day of the Tentacle, if we talk to this purple tentacle we get a nice clue that tells us how to bypass him. 'TACHE TENTACLE: But no one gets to this clock while I'm here. And unless I have to go chase down some escaped humans, I'm glued to this spot. And if we chat to the guard looking after the human prisoners, he says: GUARD TENTACLE: What are you doing for dinner? How about Club Tentacle? Ah, what am I saying, I can't afford to take out the trash let alone a classy babe like you.

So, maybe we should try to win the human contest, then. 'TACHE TENTACLE: Why, the grand prize is dinner for two at Club Tentacle. Signposting is like providing lots of little, subtle goals for those who are listening and looking carefully. Too subtle and the clue can be missed, of course. Too obvious and the player feels cheated. But get it just right, and the player is set up for that all-important 'a-ha!' moment. That rush of blood to the brain when you have a lead, and can start figuring stuff out.

Poor signposting leaves players not understanding the point of the puzzle. When Manny looks at this pneumatic message tube, he just says: MANNY: It's locked. Which might make you think you need a key or to break the lock, when actually the solution is to slide a card into this slot. Trust me, even the most stupid puzzles, like one about how it always rains whenever you wash a car, can be saved with good signposting. BERNARD: Some people think that washing one's vehicle will make it rain.

THIEF: Oh? BERNARD: Uh huh. THIEF: How about that? Rule three is feedback. A puzzle should help solve itself, letting you know if you're on the right track and rebuffing you if you're not. If you try to do something that makes some logical sense, it's utterly infuriating to hear some generic line like GABRIEL KNIGHT: Nope, those don't work together. MANNY: I don't really wanna do that So, instead, the player should get a explanation of why that specific combination is flawed, and hopefully a small nudge towards the real solution.

LAVERNE: Stop chattering mummy. LAVERNE: The judges will think you're chewing gum. Oh this will never work. Follow those three golden rules and you should end up with good puzzles. Puzzles where the player knows what they need to do, and has a good idea of how to solve it, and is helped to come to the right answer. Puzzles that, if you look them up, make you say "oh, I should have figured that out" and not "are you kidding me?!" Puzzles that feel fair, and don't send the player rushing to GameFAQs or the LucasArts hint line.

Of course, elevating a puzzle from good to great is where the real creativity comes in. Play Day of the Tentacle when that promised remastered version comes out, and solve the brilliant time-traveling puzzles that make use of the three characters being spread across 400 years of history to see how it's done. Tentacle is not perfect, of course. It requires some real-world knowledge that not all players have, it's got a tiny bit of pixel hunting, and if you don't listen carefully you'll miss the signposting altogether and can't always hear it a second time.

But if LucasArts was making it today (or, making any games today), there are lots of modern conveniences that it could use to make the experience even more palatable. Many games today let you highlight all interactive objects to avoid pixel hunting. Telltale's early games have characters spill hints if you fail to solve a puzzle in a certain amount of time. Sci-fi noir Gemini Rue has multiple solutions to some puzzles and robot odyssey Machinarium gives away the answer, but only if you can finish a mini game.

While many blame the death of the adventure game on these harebrained puzzles, others have claimed that it was the genre's inability to evolve. 3D graphics only made the games more clunky, and the addition of extra mechanics was rarely successful. They just couldn't keep pace with other genres, critics say. But I think there's lots of room for innovation, and reason to return to this genre. Adventure game revivalist Wadjet Eye has games like Resonance that turn your memories into inventory objects, and Technobabylon which lets you talk to electrical objects while you're in a cyber trance.

And even before the genre kicked the bucket, games like The Last Express toyed with real-time adventuring, and Blade Runner encouraged multiple playthroughs by randomly picking which characters would be a replicant. So there's plenty more for this genre to do, and I for one hope it lives on. But it does need smarter, more player-friendly design to shake off that stigma of being the genre of cat hair moustaches and nuisance goats. Until then, it might never come back in any meaningful way. And I think that would be a shame.

Thanks for watching! What's the worst puzzle you've ever come across in a game? Tell us why it sucked so bad in the comments down below. Also, please like the episode, subscribe on YouTube, and consider supporting me and my ad-free videos, over on Patreon.