OPTIONAL ALTERNATIVES - A DIFFERENT SUBSTITUTE

I can definitely imagine a game where the exploration revolved around not just wandering and walking around, but solving puzzles, noticing small clues, investigating objects, figuring out riddles, and interacting with the environment in a wide variety of ways. In terms of gameplay, this exploration could resemble anything from Myst, to Monkey Island, to Maniac Mansion, to a trap-filled D&D dungeon, to La Mulana, to Legend of Zelda, to a hidden pictures game. The main thing is that there needs to be LOTS of different ways to interact with the environment, and they need to not all be immediately obvious. The player has to constantly be trying to figure out what part of the environment to interact with, and also what exactly to do with it.

But the real key here, to make it different in the way Darken is talking about, would be that figuring out these puzzles would be mandatory. None of them would lead to secrets. Instead they'd just lead further into the game. But there would also be a lot of dead end traps, for players who misunderstood the puzzle or the environment and went the wrong way or did the wrong thing. If you solve a puzzle wrong, bam, you spring a trap. If you go through a door without figuring out the clue that the door is fake, same thing happens. You take a poison dart to the face, or you fall in a spike trap, or you spawn an enemy, or whatever. And this damage would probably make the battles, and especially the boss fight at the end of the dungeon, a lot harder. Or if the game doesn't have battles, then faceplanting into a trap would instead lower the player's score, and maybe reduce the rewards they get at the end of the stage.

In this kind of model, the game is still about exploration. More than ever before, really, since the exploration is now mandatory. But going the wrong way doesn't net you hidden rewards. It nets you a punishment, because that's the wrong way.

It would be vitally important in a game like this that the "right way" would always be something players should be able to figure out. Preferably by some combination of thinking hard about it and noticing enough details as they explore, rather than JUST by thinking about it, because having to find and notice lots of little details is a big part of what would make this into an exploration game.

I can think of a lot of games that do everything I said above. La Mulana and Legend of Zelda, for example. Those games just all typically also reward you with treasure sometimes for going a certain wrong way and finding a hidden secret. But you could strip all that out and make every single secret lead to mandatory progress.

Certain Sierra/LucasArts adventure games kinda almost do the above. You could probably convert one of them into this idea by adding a bunch of penalties for wrong answers. As they are, guessing the wrong answer in those games usually just results in "I can't do that." Or an in immediate game over if you're playing the original Maniac Mansion.

Let's remember there's also the "Change the path once you die" mechanic employed in games such as Dead Cells or Stanley Parable. If you haven't played those, basically, you die/end game a lot in these games. Once you restart however, the entire map changes.

While Dead Cells is more rogue-like, I like how in Stanley Parable, the game changes permanently depending on what you did before.

Perhaps in your game you can change the path entirely on each run through?

author=Darken
The 6th column, well is probably a very depressing game in which everything is either a game over or a bad ending depending on how you look at it. A game where you cannot win but some people would argue "survival is winning" or that bad endings could merely be a goal/green.

I just wanna chime in here since I think this topic is interesting and I've played a 6th column game:

Column 6, sounds a lot like the Clocktower games. Specifically Clock Tower:Gaiden/Clock Tower 2: The Struggle Within.
Where (unless you know very specifically, what to do in the very first level) every playthrough will lead you to a dead end, bad ending:

-You'll die in the house, can't progress any further and have to restart the game from the beginning.
-there's variations of each death within the house, further limiting your branches:
i.e. you'll die on the roof, make it pass the roof, die in the bathroom, make it pass the bathroom, die in the bedroom.
delete your save file, restart the game

-You'll survive the house, but you'll die in the hospital, can't progress any further and have to restart from the beginning.
-there's variations of each death that happens within the hospital, further limiting those branches.(same as above)
-You'll make it pass the house and the hospital, but because you missed something in the house, you can't progress any further, die and have to restart from the beginning.
-You'll make it pass the house and the hospital, you found what you needed from the house and progress further, but because you missed something from the hospital, you can't progress any further, die and have to restart from the very beginning.
-You make it pass the house, pass the hospital, found what you needed from the house, found what you needed from the hospital, it's near the end of the game.
The game branches off between 3 distinct routes depending on what you do in this final act:
- one ending is where you die
- one ending is where your friend dies, but you live
- one ending is where you both live but the enemy dies.

Clock Tower 2:The Struggle Within
was probably one of the worst games I played through. It's the only game where I found myself literally, contemplating my life choices, and trying to think of millions of other things I could be doing with my time, other than playing this game. Because, I'd make it up to a certain point in the game, only to find out it was a complete dead end. But these dead ends, are things you're not even aware of, while you're still trying to figure out the game - Like taking the door on the right, at the very beginning of the game and taking the red piece of paper out of the office desk. Or taking the samurai helmet off the statue on the 2nd floor immediately, after getting access to that part of the game. These are things you would only know to do, if you were looking at a walkthrough. - It's not like Resident Evil or Silent Hill, where there's a very definite point of no return. These are very minute decisions. There's no way the player would be able to figure these things out on their own through multiple playthroughs, because the game doesn't even allow for experimentation. -- It would've been cooler if there was some indication that, these minute choices, at particular points in the game actually do matter, so the player could start to experiment with them and actually explore them.

...But yeah, aside from how frustrating this was to playthrough, I thought it was really interesting how, the game branches off into several different and numerous bad endings. It's kind of almost like this spiderweb, where you work your way up to the perfect ending, where you actually do feel, a true sense of accomplishment, like you actually survived a horror movie by getting the perfect ending, because you've witnessed how many ways, things could've went wrong - But yeah, make no mistake, this wasn't fun to playthrough at all.

I think playing around with structure in video games is fun - but after a certain point, playing through, said actually structure, isn't really all that fun to playthrough - like even in arcade games like Metal Slug 3 or Space Ace, I don't find myself purposely replaying these games to find a specific route, unless I want to see everything that game has to offer. Most of the time, I just choose the best route and just replay those best scenes over and over again.

But yeah, I can't think of any variations of this structure to add.

But if you want to see a 6th column game. Check out ClockTower 2: The Struggle Within. In order to understand how frustrating this game plays with structure, You'll have to play through it. it's not something you can watch from a youtube video. It's like working so hard, to get to a certain point of the game, only to realize it's another dead end. I'm making it sound better than it actually is - It's not fun, it's not fun at all. It's like losing all your progress during a thunderstorm and having to start over: the game.

Great thread here Darken!♥

I think this is a pretty good list. I think if you want to make the game more interesting than the small set of choices in Darken's list suggests, you're going to have to do so by combining these structures together and looping them back around on each other to create a more complex map. Or, you're going to have to start making the player choose their path in a more interesting and interactive way than just walking in a different direction.

I do think it's worth counting a unique case where the player has to not only select the right path, but also first discover that it exists. This isn't really a different structure than anything Darken mentioned, but it's another way to differentiate the exploration in two different games that might otherwise seem to use the same option out of Darken's list.



In the original Legend of Zelda, you have to bomb every wall and burn every bush in the entire game. A few bombable walls have moblins inside who make you pay the door repair fee for blowing up their house. Most others have a reward which might be either optional or mandatory. Some things are not hidden, though the non-hidden things are never traps. This is probably the most common structure for hidden paths - having all three types, while also making some mandatory paths be non-hidden.

In a typical section of Super Metroid, there are likely to be a bunch of hidden spots you can find, each by a slightly different method. There's also one mandatory path which is not hidden. The mandatory path often has obstacles that take some time to figure out, but its mere existence is never invisible like the optional rewards are. For example, to complete a mandatory path, you might enter a room have to use your grappling hook in a new way you've never used it before, but to find an optional item you might have to shoot a random tile that looks identical to 800 other tiles in the same room. There are no traps in Super Metroid.

La Mulana is an exercise in frustration for many players - it's a game where every single thing in the game is hidden. Unlike Super Metroid or Legend of Zelda, there's no systematic way to discover these hidden paths - each one is different, often requiring the player to solve what amounts to an invisible puzzle, like "stand in this unmarked spot for 3 minutes" or "fall onto this unmarked tile from as high as possible." And none of these puzzles have even their presence conveyed to the player in an obvious way - in 100% of cases, it's possible to go through a room without even realizing there's something to find. The game conveys what to do via subtle clues that the player must notice and then also interpret, such as "there was a thump sound and it came from the right speaker, so maybe something happened in a room further right" or "this statue's eyes opened, so I should check the room 19 screens back where there was another matching statue."

The Tomb of Horrors is a classic Dungeons & Dragons adventure. A typical room in the Tomb of Horrors has a lot of details, one obvious exit which is (almost) always a trap, and a lot of hidden traps which are punishments for interacting with the wrong detail or doing so in the wrong way. The game uses riddles to try to convey what to do, but interpreting the riddles is difficult. The riddles often only make sense in retrospect (and sometimes not even then). For example, the riddle "If you find the false you find the true" is supposed to convey that when players find a hidden door leading to a dead end with a trap, they can search the dead end (after being impaled with spikes) to find a second hidden door which actually leads to mandatory progress.

Notably, in all of the above games except for Super Metroid, it's possible (in fact, it's very likely) for players to get stuck and simply be unable to complete the game without a walkthrough. I think that is frustrating to a large majority of players, and is why very few games put mandatory objectives behind hidden paths. Modern Metroid and Zelda games heavily de-emphasize even optional hidden paths, having only the occasional bombable wall or hidden grotto that isn't clearly marked. I think it's not a coincidence that Super Metroid is a game people love, Legend of Zelda is a game people tolerate because of its sequels, and the other two games I listed are strongly hated by most players. Most people really do not like hidden mandatory paths. La Mulana has a small niche audience that enjoys it, though. So maybe there are enough people who do like them for an indie developer to capitalize on the fact that AAA games are ignoring that audience.

I suppose there hasn't been much discussion of dead end paths that contain nothing. Probably because they're uninteresting.

Open world games are founded on the idea of adding 99 places with nothing for every actual path that has something, though. And for some reason, a lot of people seem to like that. I guess they're not actually "dead end" paths, since you can go directly from one spot that has nothing to the next, instead of having to backtrack to a main path first. But they're certainly dead locations.

I guess if you have a very generous view of random battles, then putting random battles in your game turns all your pointless dead ends and dead locations into red dots. Is that an improvement...? I'm very much unconvinced that it is. In a typical modern-style open world game, it certainly sounds like an awful addition. It doesn't ever seem like a satisfying solution in JRPG dungeons, either. But it works okay in... hex crawl board games, I guess.

hmmm... the only other framework that I can think of is massive randomization - random level layouts, random rewards/loot, random enemy placements. A lot of roguelikes (and Diablo and its clones) explore this route. But then you are faced with not so much as a linear path but a treadmill.