HINT-GIVING ITEMS IN PUZZLE-HEAVY GAMES

author=Sooz
So this isn't just Layton Talk, what are good options for hinting?

In several games, I've seen the option of an NPC who could dispense hints, usually for a price.

I'm not sure how the hint goggles work, but would it be better if, instead of equipment, it were a setting that could be turned on or off at will?

You do turn them on and off at will - once it's equipped, you make hint ghosts visible who help you with tips if you give them a play coin.

author=LockeZ
Obviously not every player is the same. Telling your players "you're just playing the game wrong, try altering the way your subconscious mind works" is beyond idiotic. You're the game designer; controlling their subconscious is your job.

Trying to imagine how the subconscious mind works of every single possible variety of player and coming up with a way to appease them all is even more idiotic. There is no right answer to that question. Regardless of how you go about introducing a feature, there will be a group of people who see it in a negative way somehow. Or have a different preferred method.

You're a game designer, not a mentalist. You have to make a choice, and this is the one they chose. As a player, you should just accept those choices instead of finding ways to make up complaints about something that is already set in stone.

You want them to design the game a different way to ease your perception of the game. A perception many other people don't have. Maybe some people like it the way it is, and would start complaining if it was done a different way.

Moving forward, if you don't like that kind of method and want to do it differently. That's your choice as a designer. But the method itself is valid.

Calling something "optional" doesn't make you as the designer devoid of responsibility for how players experience it.

The way the goggles are described to me makes perfect sense. I would think that most players wouldn't have trouble getting a positive experience out of it.

There are hundreds of different ways to present "optional" parts of the game and every little thing you do - every sound effect you choose, every choice of where on the menu to place each thing, every choice of wording - affects how players perceive it. That's what I'm trying to talk about here. Not the big picture, but the micro level.

Well the title of the topic is Hint-giving items, and your OP was all about difficulty settings, hints, and how they are presented. That seems pretty specific to me. Like you want to talk specifically about hints, which is quite different from all other aspects of game design. I wouldn't have guessed that you meant to discuss such a thing. Hint's are more about helping the player when they don't get the intended meaning of all those other choices, sound dialogue menu...

But even when you talk about the way the hint ghosts are presented, you are speaking about how you interpret them so it's more of an opinion. As opposed to a legitimate complaint like, a boss that puts everyone to sleep on the first turn and has a random chance of casting a massive multi-hit move that can kill everyone on the second turn(where you have no way of preventing it from happening).

It's like trying to convince Liberty that it's ok to have content in a game where you have to make a choice and you can only get one of the two things in a single play through. Some people will like that feature and others won't. There is simply no way to alter the presentation of that feature to appease both sides without changing the core of that choice to something completely different.

The choice to make goggles that allow you to see ghosts is very simple, logical, and straightforward to me. The whole idea is built around it being optional. You won't see the ghosts if you don't want hints. So you can either play the game where you miss out on some content, the dialogue of talking to the ghosts, or you just play the game the same way you would if the ghosts weren't there at all. It sounds like your brain is interpreting that as, well the ghosts are there so they must be treated like any other hidden item in the game. They must be sought after and talked to. You are forcing yourself to get hints, I guess, because you can't think of their existence in any other way. There is no game designer in the world that prevent that from happening. David Blaine or Kris Angel couldn't pull that shit off.

If you think the method Link Between Worlds uses for its hints is better than the alternatives, can you express why? The various aspects of its hint interface evoke specific responses in the player; which of those responses do you approve of, and how do you think it's accomplishing them, and why do you think those responses are appropriate in a Zelda-type game?

I don't know enough about the details to really talk about alternatives. Even knowing what I know, unless I play the game and actually use them I won't understand. I don't feel much like looking up videos on it either.

The way I see it, which speaks to Sooz's comment about why they have to be Goggles, is that this is a Zelda game. Just about every thing you can do in the levels comes from choosing an item and using it on the game map. That is the main point of Zelda games. So it makes complete sense to introduce a new gameplay element in the form of a typical Zelda item.

You need to be in a specific area to get a specific hint anyways. So let's say you are in a dungeon and you can't move forward, but you have no idea which room has the missing thing. If you equip the goggles, you can move around the dungeon to try and find a ghost that is near something you haven't activated(again, not sure exactly how it works so I'm guessing). If you had to go into a menu to get a hint, what method would be used to determine which area requires the hint? Would you get a little map and you tap on which room is giving you trouble? What if the actual answer is something in a different room? Do you want the game to just scroll through a database of 'checkpoints' to see what you've done and what should be done next? What if there are multiple paths to take? Doing it through the menu, from a design perspective, seems much more difficult. Whereas if all you have to do is equip goggles and walk around the map until you find a hidden ghost that is standing near the actual place where your solution is, seems much more easier to program and easier to use as a player. But again, I have no idea if that's how the ghosts even work.

author=Sooz
I think the question here is, WHY does it have to be goggles? Why not make it an option, rather than clunkily force an out-of-game mechanic into the in-game setting?

Regardless of how it's introduced, (I think) specific in game hints are an out of game mechanic to Zelda games. Making it an equipable item at least puts it in line with everything else you do in a Zelda game.

Damn you Locke, getting me to talk about this when I didn't want to. Contradicting myself and talking about something anyways when I don't know enough details about it. I've said more than enough and I have other things I'd rather be doing. I'll read the replies but I think I'm all talked out.

author=CashmereCat
I would prefer an item that solves the puzzle for me, so I don't have to play the game.

Why are you playing the game in the first place? Do we need to call the police and report a madman with a gun forcing you to play videro games?

author=Link_2112
Regardless of how it's introduced, (I think) specific in game hints are an out of game mechanic to Zelda games. Making it an equipable item at least puts it in line with everything else you do in a Zelda game.

Well, duh, but WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO? What possible purpose does it serve to cram an out of game mechanic into the game world? It's not like the Zelda series is known for being meta or anything. Coming up with some weird in-game workaround rather than just making a setting option is making an overcomplicated solution to a minor problem. (One that's more traditionally solved with a trip to gamefaqs these days.)

Hmm. To verify Link_2112's point about different players having different psychological reactions, when I played A Link Between Worlds and found the hint goggles, I tried them out briefly, decided they weren't really necessary for a player of my experience (especially since I wanted to save play coins for Street Pass games), and I more or less forgot about their existence. Even when I ran up against puzzles that were confusing toward the point of frustration, it didn't occur to me to pull out the hint goggles. So they really did nothing to reduce the enjoyability of the game for me, although they did nothing to increase it either.

That's not to say LockeZ's experience and preferences aren't valid also, but they're one person's preferences amongst many. It's pretty hard to say whether the way things were done is better than some other way without implementing it both ways and testing them out on statistically significant samples of players, and those who are dissatisfied with the way things are done tend to be pretty vocal.

author=Frozen_Phoenix
Make a "Give hint" button, maybe as a gameplay feature... Like "you gain an extra hint if you do x". If the player need the hint they will use it, if they want more challenge, they won't.

I feel like the problem with this line of thinking is that you will get players who will never use hints, and accrue a surplus of this useless (to them) item instead of getting an extra Elixir or whatever. The game makker will see this and think "oh, well, they aren't using my hint items! I'll make the puzzles so hard they'll need the hints!" and the problem will become cyclical. I've seen lots of games (flash games, mostly, but still) that work like this: hints eventually become an established part of the puzzle solving mechanic, and everything is balanced for them to be used.


I think my favourite way to help a player solve a puzzle is to give them some piece of advice outside the puzzle itself. Maybe it's an NPC who gives a piece of in mechanical information "I work as a barrel pusher, but I'm only strong enough to push the blue barrels" or an ancient tome that reveals that blue switches can be made red by shooting them. These ideas should only be used when the player can't be shown the mechanics because of some extenuating circumstances, in which case its OK to tell them about them.

I'd never, ever give a hint like "move piece 5 three tiles to the left!", as it completely defeats the purpose of a puzzle. It removes an element of gameplay altogether. Puzzles rely entirely on you figuring them out, the same way quicktime events rely on you being quick with your time. Unlike quicktime events, however, a puzzle should be made so that everyone can, with enough time and gumption, be able to figure it out. And if they can't, they can take to the forums and ask someone else if they've figured it out. At least then they are outsourcing to the community rather than a hastily lashed up hint mechanism.

p.s. I am finish up the final Lorule dungeon in Link Between Worlds and I didn't even know there were hint goggles in that game. wat

LockeZ has abandoned this thread. I am disappointed. That'll teach me to reply to serious topics.

I guess what you really need is to not play games with hints for the plebians. :V