Re: Announcing: Fyleet, Crobe, Sangraal

[Iain Merrick <im@cs.york.ac.uk>]

Adam Atkinson wrote:
[...]
> Let us suppose that the player has realised that the crytpic message
> is supposed to convey information about the correct path, but doesn't
> understand how. The player might then get the message, save, and try
> every possible path through the maze, restoring and retrying until one
> of them works.
> 
> It does look as though prohibiting saves after the cryptic message has
> been imparted is necessary. Saves become possible again after the
> player has exited the maze.

By the same argument, surely, the player might realise that the message
holds information about the maze, and disassemble the game file to
discover how to decode it. So it's also 'necessary' to make the game
file as unreadable as possible, with encryption and so on.

Alternatively, you could just structure your puzzle in such a way that
solving it properly is obviously easier and more straightforward than
cheating. The animal symbols puzzle in Riven is a good example: you
_could_ solve it by brute force, but it's obvious that this would take a
very long time.

In the 'SUNBURN' example, it could be arranged such that you always
stumble out of the maze after your seventh move. If you've made the
_correct_ seven moves, you come out at the other side or whatever. You
get no immediate feedback about whether your first few moves are
correct, so UNDO isn't much help; therefore, the brute-force solution is
possible, just incredibly difficult.

That way, the player can still SAVE and UNDO, but the author can be
confident that the player will solve the puzzle properly. So everyone's
happy, unless I've overlooked something.

-- 
Iain Merrick
im@cs.york.ac.uk