I’m “working” on a game that involves giving instructions to multiple actors, some of which may play out over multiple turns or require multiple actors to interact in some way. It feels like this is very likely to be confusing or unpredictable to the player, though, so I’m interested in seeing examples of it being done well. (Or badly!)
I think the canonical example of this is Suspended, which uses the Infocom-type actor, command syntax. More recently, the Rosalinda games have an interesting choice-based take on a similar idea; instead of addressing a particular character each turn, it makes viewpoint switching explicit.
Any other games I should be aware of? Any pitfalls or cool things you’ve noticed?
Hmm, the most robust recent example I can think of is the robot-programming sequence in Never Gives Up Her Dead. And Fifteen Minutes sorta qualifies too, though with a twist or two!
I think a thing to watch out for is what happens if the sequence is almost right - the nature of these action programming puzzles is that often you’re just off by one turn or something, so making it easy for the player to insert a new command, or shift an existing sequence one way or another, without having to redo the whole thing, can be a nice player convenience.
Rematch comes to mind; it won best puzzle in the 2000 XYZZYs (although I, playing it 24 years later, struggled with said puzzle immensely ). It’s not entirely about commanding other people, but “actor, command” is a significant part of it.
I played Rematch – thanks again for suggesting it!
Wrote down a couple topic-relevant notes. Pretty much anything you can say about Rematch is a spoiler, so I’ll tag the whole thing.
Rematch’s command mechanic does two things that seem interesting and pretty rare:
Not only do you tell an NPC to do something, you tell an NPC to tell another NPC to do something. I’ve never seen this sort of “nested command” before, but it makes sense technically and is worked into the narrative in a cute-but-effective way.
The commands need to be delivered with a particular affect: “whisper” and “dare” instead of “ask” or “tell”. It seems rare for games to care about how the command is given vs. the raw instructions. (I think Varicella did something similar, though it’s been many years since I tried it.)
The non-command version of this idea gets complained about – eg. old text adventures that made you go north quietly or examine carefully – but mostly for reasons that don’t seem to apply here. (The custom verbs are clearly telegraphed, and the game gives you ~no opportunity to forget about them.)
One practical pitfall I worry about for this kind of mechanic mechanic is that actor, command or tell actor to command makes the input long and harder to type. For Rematch, this is of course the point, and it avoids being tedious by having only one move and being fairly short. It feels like these ideas would need some tweaking to work well in a larger game, but they probably could work! Will reflect on this.
). It’s not entirely about commanding other people, but “actor, command” is a significant part of it.