Text adventures are, almost by necessity, designed to railroad the player into doing something without it being obvious or annoying. Any mechanics introduced should be a natural extension to the world the player discovers, provide sufficient freedom so they don’t feel like a funnel, yet guide the player in the correct direction. In the text adventures I’ve listen to played on the Cortex/Upgrade crossover episodes, I’ve noticed that mechanics often act as hints. They are like bumpers on a wall (which may kill you, but you can make a different decision the next time.)
All these realizations have come after thinking carefully through the mechanics and puzzles I wrote which were clearly bad (and the few which were actually good), and trying to figure out what precisely caused them to have the effect on the players they did. It’s often me not paying attention to my good sense and the feedback of testers. More frequently it’s me trying to subdue the text adventure genre until it allows me to try and tell a story, rather than building a story that works within a framework.
Directly, most of my text adventure failures have come from a single mechanic undermining any positive decisions I made.
Sail Away
While I handled the mechanics of talking with NPCs reasonably well in this adventure, the main failure was creating an ongoing battle. This was a difficult decision, as I didn’t want the battle to fade into the background and lose its sense of urgency. Instead I swung too far in the opposite direction, and built a game mechanic for an RPG. There was randomly-assigned cannon fire, an NPC fighting against a boarding crew, and much more. While my players where lenient with me, I found it to be tough to manage and not nearly as engaging as it could have been. There was a great opportunity for a puzzle, something more subtle, or even a better way to handle such a fight that was in line with the genre.
I learned about building mechanics that are more natural to the world after this, but did not change their ambition.
Homestead
The puzzles created in this game were rather self-evident: You need water, and you need food. In something survival-based, there must be consequences for not finding the materials you need fast enough. So, I built in slightly perverse mechanics that forced the player to start the game with near perfection, otherwise they would die of thirst. I had a similar mechanic for going to sleep and getting food, although that was a bit more lenient.
The difficult thing with such mechanics is not allowing it to be too arbitrary. I had to allow a watch so the player could keep track of things, yet it caused distances to be a little distorted because I had to set times for travel, and somewhat ignore the time spent at the place itself. It’s not unusual to have these types of mechanics in a text adventure, but I had only listened to one such instance of them; I did not have insight into the details of the mechanics. It actually ended up going rather well, partly because it was a familiar way of running such a game. Despite the final “puzzle” of making a bow being a bit too subtle, Homestead was a great success on this front than Sail Away. However, I wanted to move away from standard mechanics.
Coffee and Donuts
Mechanically, this game was far more ambitious than any others. I wanted to include a good hunk of math hidden away, and so the map became a tic-tac-toe board that changed with a dial controlled by the player. The doors would move, and rooms would “wrap around” in a way that was confusing to the player. My one regret was that I couldn’t come up with a single set of walls that would be consistent across all maps, and still utilize the several maps that I wanted.
The goal of this map was to explore different geometries, based on different mathematical objects. When you reach the “end” of a map, you can actually wrap around to a different room depending on how the rooms are connected mathematically. This leads to several maps needed to be created, as well as a fun little game for me, where the player has to beat an NPC controlled by me in a game of tic-tac-toe on the current board selected. To that end, depending on the map, they can win or lose in a fashion that seems totally unfair. This whole mechanic was a strong point of this game.
The more standard puzzles that made up the game were a mismatch for the map. They were poorly-designed, and I did not take the feedback when play-testing as seriously as I should have. As a result, the entire game suffered. However, the idea of a shifting map has a lot of room for growth, and I will revisit it with a more critical eye in the future.
Recurring Nightmare
The basic idea for this game was simple, and so I needed mechanics that would not overcomplicate the premise of the story. This led me to creating a meta-puzzle surrounding the game. The only real obstacle is a keypad the player must unlock to finish the game. Since there were four accessible rooms, I made the keypad have four dials.
Clues for the keypad ended up like the cliche line about jazz: It was always about the clues that weren’t there. A player could, rather quickly, “finish” the game by going through the four accessible rooms, yet they would gain no items or clear information. Everything was indirect, frustration being the only way to recognize that only four numbers were ever spoken throughout the game. Toss in a few clues related to the Fibonacci sequence for math nerds, and the puzzle ended up more satisfying that even I had intended.
Overall, I’ve started to hit my stride with puzzles. I like meta-games, and minimalist rooms with very little to do. I don’t think I have a knack for the larger games I tried to build into Sail Away and Homestead, yet those basic ideas for stories can be a wonderful backdrop for clever mechanics. They must all work in tandem though, because one poorly-designed puzzle is enough to halt progress and leave a sour taste in a player’s mouth. There’s a fine line between puzzles that are satisfying to solve, and those that are difficult for the sake of being difficult. Of course that line is subjective and depends on the player, but I write my adventures exclusively for a group of friends that will play them for me, so the onus is on me to make sure they are satisfactory.