Re: Announcing: Fyleet, Crobe, Sangraal

[Nat Lanza <magus@cs.cmu.edu>]

pmt6jrp@gps.leeds.ac.uk (J R Partington) writes:

> No, you've missed the point. The sort of puzzle that we have in mind
> is one where there is a unique route through a maze, which is told to
> you in a cryptic message by a character in the game (and different
> players of the game will be given different routes and hence different
> cryptic messages). 

I don't think I have missed the point. If you want to require the
player to find the cryptic message before solving the maze, make the
maze unsolvable until the player gets the message. With appropriate
"You seem to be getting completely lost"-style hinting, only the most
bloody-minded players will keep trying to brute-force solve the maze.

Restricting saves so you don't have to do this is a shortcut for the
author. It isn't necessary for this sort of puzzle, it just makes
writing them easier.

> Once you have the message you need to demonstrate that you know what
> it means by rushing through the maze. If instead you save the game and
> later find the correct route by trial and error, then you have not
> solved the puzzle.

So what stops a player from saving as close to the maze as possible
and then brute-forcing it? Unless you disable saving entirely, you
don't. And if you make a long game that doesn't have a save feature,
you've just managed to make an unplayable game.

Determined players will find a wrong way around and puzzle. You can't
stop that. So why inconvenience everybody to protect your puzzle from
a pathological few?

> Many variations on this theme are possible, of course.
> 
> Saving and restoring is such an artificial thing to do anyway (when did
> you last manage it in real life?) that maybe it should be banned in
> all games 8-)

See, this ties into the realism issue. I don't play games to have a
totally realistic experience. I play them to have fun. Not being able
to save and quit when I want to is not fun. I don't like games that
aren't fun.


--nat

-- 
nat lanza --------------------- research programmer, parallel data lab, cmu scs
magus@cs.cmu.edu -------------------------------- http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~magus/
there are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths -- alfred north whitehead