Been typing away at this game, learning how Godot and Escoria work as I go. So far it’s been fairly smooth sailing, and most bugs have been easy to sort out. Honestly the most difficult part of adventure game making so far has been puzzle design. I have a general idea of how the story is going to work out, but integrating puzzles that don’t feel shoe-horned in is challenging. Many puzzles start to take the form of a locked door, which feels very obvious. I did find a couple of helpful links in my puzzle research:
- https://www.alanvandrake.com/puzzler/
- Generates a puzzle type and solution based on some blog post some guy wrote. Good for inspiration.
- https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2917/designing_and_integrating_puzzles_.php?print=1
- Gamasutra article on puzzle design.
- https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/40978/roleplaying-games/random-gm-tip-using-revelation-lists
- Another person’s blog post about mystery reveals. Technically it’s for tabletop games, but I feel the same principle applies. Same person has another article about the “three clue rule”, which says that there should be at least three clues that lead players to reach conclusions. Again, it probably makes more sense applied to roleplaying games, but it’s an interesting idea to make an adventure game less linear.
- https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=56612.0
- A forum thread in which some folks are listing any kind of adventure game puzzle they can think of.
So I’ll keep chugging along on this first draft of the game. In the meantime, here’s a background in progress:
