In adventure games and, in particular, text adventures, limiting what the
player can do is a major part of the game. Players can become frustrated from
seeing “you can’t do that” too often. How hard do you work to eliminate this
problem?
Part of this is limiting the geography of the game. The original choice of setting helps.
This is why so many games are set inside a geography with very well-defined bound-
aries like a cave, castle, island, zeppelin, et cetera. It’s less frustrating to not even
perceive a boundary than to reach a boundary and be told “There’s nothing interesting
in that direction” or “You’d probably die of thirst if you tried crossing that desert.”
Part of it is just rolling up your sleeves and putting in as many non-default
responses as possible, based on initial guesses of what people will try, augmented by
suggestions from testers and even more ideas from reading the transcripts of testers’
game sessions. Adding such responses was only limited by time and, more often, by
disk space. This was also a good way to put in hints; a player tries something which isn’t
the “Right Answer” but which is a “Reasonable Thing to Try.” I’d make the response an
explanation of the failure, but perhaps a clue for what to try. For example:
GIVE THE SANDWICH TO THE OLD MAN
He looks too tired to eat right now.
And part of it is making the default responses as flexible and fun as possible. For
example, inHitchhiker’s, the default response for the verb FILL was “Phil who?” Phil
was Zaphod’s alias during the party scene. For another example, inZork Ithe default
response to many “impossible” actions was chosen from a table, giving you a variety of
responses.
So instead of:
TAKE ALL
loaf of bread: Taken.
knife: It’s stuck firmly into countertop.
countertop: You can’t take that!
sink: You can’t take that!
stove: You can’t take that!
oven: You can’t take that!
Do you have a particular starting point when creating a new game?
Varies from game to game.AMFVstarted with the game’s theme/message.Sorcerer
started with the complex time travel, meet-your-own-self puzzle and built from there.
I’ve explained earlier what the seed ideas were forPlanetfallandThe Space Bar. Gen-
erally, I don’t do all of one thing before moving on to the next. I don’t write the entire
story line, and then start on the geography, and then when that’s done start writing
some puzzles. Instead, I’ll rough out a story line, then design the core part of the geog-
raphy, start populating it with characters and puzzles, refine the story line, add a new
scene with resulting geography, add in the two puzzles I thought of in the meantime,
combine two characters into a single character, add a couple more rooms to that Labora-
tory section of the game, add a new puzzle to flesh out the end-game, figure out why
Esmerelda ran away from home in the first place, and so forth.
Chapter 10: Interview: Steve Meretzky 199
you’d get:
>TAKE ALL
loaf of bread: Taken.
knife: It’s stuck firmly into countertop.
countertop: What a concept!
sink: Think again.
stove: Not bloody likely.
oven: Think again.