Jay is Games

So, there's a game design competition just starting at Jay Is Games. The theme? Explore.

When they originally suggested explore as a topic, there were a lot of ideas that came to my mind, none of which were what the public was afraid the competition would be full of.

My first idea was a platformer game, and the idea was based around a really badly designed maze I played about a year ago. Basically, you would be given some arbitrary, and more importantly impossible goal. The impossibility of the goal isn't immediately apparent, because any game can say 'find the boss' or 'collect a hundred coins'. Obviously, whatever is needed to access the end of the game is absent - the last coin, the key to the boss door, whatever. It is also important to have the game be extremely maze-like and moderately large. One-way tunnels are great for this. The goal, of course, isn't to have the player actually complete the goal you set for them, but in fact for the player to draw a map of all the different routes they could be taking. This would spell out - if it were done correctly - a code phrase, or even a world location that they would have not have been able to decipher without a map.

But there are a number of difficulties with this particular method. The biggest difficulty is the fact that the actual goal is different from the goal stated. Not all players - in fact likely very few players - will even realize the secondary goal, even if hinted at subtly. Most players would likely stumble around without a map until they got frustrated, then leave and say they didn't enjoy it - and that's the opposite of good design. There has to be a deliberate mechanism to encourage the player to make the map. The second difficulty is the lack of reply value. Let's face it, once one person has beaten the game and let everyone know that the secret is the code hidden in the map itself, there will only be a few people who continue the game, and nobody will come back to it once they've beaten it themselves. The last difficulty is level design. How do you build a game whose map contains an obvious message for the player drawing the map out, but has the message - or even the fact there is a message - hidden from those who aren't drawing that map. Have it be really big? Have the paths between areas be the letters? Only display the points, and have the players connect the dots? ... actually, that last one's proven effecive in Kingdom of Loathing, but again - once one player picks up the trick and lets everyone know - it gets redundant for others to do the same.

The next idea I had had, was actually an offshoot of this. What about doing the above in the dark, using a flashlight? The message is written on the floor spread across all sorts of different areas, but the sections of the letter won't appear until you shine your light on them. It's another neat idea, but the idea of programming a flashlight in a maze is daunting for any programmer. It still has almost all the same problems, too. No replay value. The message is either totally obvious, or completely abstract. Intensely complex maze design required. Clearly, this particular idea isn't going anywhere.

Time to move onto the next idea.