Puzzle dependency chart

Continuing the discussion from Anchorhead is too hard for me:

1.) It is unclear to me if you prefer a single line as the ideal puzzle dependency.

2.) It seems to me that if you need a dependency chart then you haven’t structured the puzzles well. (Or maybe you aren’t simply that good at memorizing it and take advantage of writing it down?)

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I definitely disagree on the second one! Dependency charts are an important tool for keeping track of:

  • How many different puzzles will be available at one time
  • Which puzzles are “bottlenecks” blocking off a large portion of the game
  • If you have created a circular dependency

This is the dependency chart for Familiar Problems, and it saved us so many headaches in design. For example, we wanted to ensure that every verb (cyan bubbles), except at the very beginning and very end, was used three times, and this makes it easy to check that. At one point, the Stagecraft Department was accessed from the Chemistry Lab, but that meant the entire security puzzle was gated behind the galvanized door, which made it far too much of a bottleneck; rearranging the map meant you had two main “tracks” to work on in the main body of the game (getting TRANSMUTE and getting the poison).

Sure, all of this could also be figured out by writing it out longhand. But for me at least, putting it in visual form makes it trivial to see things that wouldn’t be at all obvious otherwise.

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I made a puzzle dependency chart when working on The Restricted Archive.

Not sure if it was necessary, but it was a decent way to keep my thoughts organized when designing the puzzles, and it’s satisfying to look at.

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I love puzzles dependency charts for the same reasons.

I would add a fourth: it allows (me) to verify the consistency of the knowledge (facts, clues, motivations, encounters) acquired by the PC and necessary for obtaining deeper knowledge. This is very useful when constructing plots that involve the temporal dimension and require reconstructing a series of events from the traces still present in the game universe, especially with NPCs which have subjective and altered viewpoints on the situation, which can be challenged or modified.

I used them while designing TTRPG home-made campaigns, because players usually spot the slightest inconsistency in the plots.

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Thanks, that makes sense. Except the third one. I don’t think I will ever create a circular dependency. But that’s perhaps ignorant to think.

It doesn’t happen very often (and shows up during testing if it does), but when it does, it’s very good to head it off before you code it all!

That makes sense, too, yes! :slight_smile:

That’s interesting since I liked to play TTRPGs (but unfortunately never DMed one).

Summing it up I think (now) puzzle dependency graphs are neccessary if the IF (or more precisely its puzzles) reaches a certain complexity.

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Thank you. When you regularly DM, you quickly learn, for example, to dissociate the information you give to the player from the locations where they are supposed to find it. The same goes for the vectors of said information. Freeing the plot from space to a certain extent allows you to constantly adjust the difficulty to maintain challenge without being punitive, while preventing players from straying too far from the main storyline. And this, in an apparently natural way.

I’m discovering that this way of thinking is very useful in my current WIP: the PC can’t really stray from the story (it’s not Skyrim!), but they need to be able to progress, so everything they do should provide them with information that allows them to get involved.

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@Draconis , @averyhiebert , your charts are very easy to interpret. This is just some neuro ramblings… I don’t know why my mind reels away from the sight of such charts. Like I see all those circles and lines and think Argh! Then I shove that reaction aside and see the chart is very useful.

Maybe it’s just that this manner of thinking is home turf for my brain. I find I’m able to float this kind of info like a model in my head (is this related to my teen DMing past ala @Monsieur.HUT ‘s thoughts?). So for instance, my WIP is the size of @mathbrush ’s NGUHD, but I haven’t written out any clarifying puzzle dependency charts. On the other hand, tech programming of the kind the Mad Scientists can knock out in minutes sometimes takes me days, and possibly the writing down of stuff.

-Wade

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Maybe. By imagining stories, we become so intimate with the smallest details of our imaginary world, don’t we ?

However, I see two other advantages to this kind of tool, even for focused authors: the first is that it allows us to continue to create even more and more quickly, more solidly. The second, and this seems really important to me given the amount of work that programming requires, is purely strategic: when we have a clear plan, we can modify it in case of a problem. When we don’t have one, we often have to restart from scratch.

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I can see how this would emerge from an Anchorhead discussion. I’m a huge fan of the writing, so I rate it highly, but I played it for the third time earlier this year and it’s so easy to wind up spinning your wheels or getting into a zombie state.

I’ve tried to have it both ways in the past, as in the critical path was a straight line but a completionist playthrough had dependencies. I liked the way it turned out, but I’m not sure it would work a second time. I wrote on whatever was handy: the back of a bill, an envelope, or a notepad. I often just needed to remember a few things at a time.

I think geography is a way to keep things manageable; perhaps there are a few dependencies at one time, but the number doesn’t climb beyond that due to modular geography or some other factor.

The maps for my next game are much larger, so I won’t be able to rely on that so much. I guess an important question is “am I managing this for players or for me” (the answers don’t have to be mutually exclusive, of course).

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One example of puzzle dependency that I noticed worked really well was in the remake of Silent Hill 2.

The initial section is open world in a town and progress is gated by a puzzle requiring the player assemble two pieces of a broken record, and then find a missing jukebox button and a coin to play the record in the jukebox.

The first broken piece is in the jukebox. The other and the glue to fix them is in a music store. The player might encounter either location first, but both have notes describing the weird behavior of a patron who smashed a jukebox up in a rage, then apologized and said they would “fix it”. The bar with the jukebox says he “headed toward the music store” but also that the character might need to be checked on and specifies where he lives. In the music store, the note says the character arrived in a rage wanting to fix the record but didn’t have the other half, and that it probably came from the jukebox in the bar - and I think mentions the character was preparing to leave and likely went home to do so.

In the apartment and around it notes are found by the character who wants to leave, saying they have “one last stop” at a diner, where the player can find the token needed to start the jukebox. The missing jukebox button is found in the character’s apartment - the building of which is another open area - the correct apartment is locked, but there are building notes about a “leak” in the apartment above another one with a key, which trains the player they can navigate around the building by connected balconies and fire-escapes between some apartments, or holes broken in the wall.

What makes the puzzle work is each location where something is found directs the player via in-world notes to one or more other locations where puzzle-bits can be found despite the order the player searches in - even though the puzzle elements are scattered ludicrously and must be searched for, there are clear designations of the general area where each can be found, and all can be found in random order. The player is never “stuck” unless they completely miss a key object at a location, and they can investigate other locations that will continue to direct them back to the correct locations involved in the puzzle.

This is a mess, but shows how the player is eventually funneled toward plot advancement.

I think the key in puzzle design is to avoid a bottleneck where a player has to do a specific thing, and that’s the only thing they can do. Side tracks should direct the player (albeit vaguely) where to go next.

The other handy thing in SH2 is the player has a map which is auto-annotated - if the player reads material directing somewhere, it is circled on the map, then checked off if the player gets the thing they need there.

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Yes, three times yes. First of all, it’s a question of politeness towards the player, which is not in the author’s mind. But above all, it is more realistic: in real life, when we are stuck in a situation, we look for new information related to our problem to overcome it. I also like the method of allowing an obstacle to be overcome in several different ways, or information to be understood in several indirect ways.

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Yes, I’ve always been a proponent of giving the player a task, but still remaining on their side. The worst scenario is when a player knows what to do but doesn’t know how to do it - or doing it is a long and involved busywork process.

For example, in a parser game there might be some tricky guess-the-verb with a combination lock. Is it SET DIAL TO 3-4-5, TURN DIAL TO 3. TURN DIAL LEFT TO FOUR, ENTER COMBINATION 345… I find it encouraging when the author does the player a solid - if they have found all three digits for the combination and they examine the lock again, just automatically have the PC understand and unlock it. They’ve done the work and you don’t want them to get caught on fiddly implementation.

This was kind of the philosophy in LucasArts in the Monkey Island games - when you have to row back and forth graphically between several islands to complete a puzzle, the game predicts when the player is trying to solve it and puts up a title “After more furious paddling…” and sets the player down where they need to go without making them actually navigate it manually.

Similarly, climbing a tree with holes spiraling up it requires two wooden planks that fit in the holes and must be alternated as stair steps. After it’s clear the player knows what they are doing (stepping on one, pulling the one behind them and putting it in the next hole as the next step) the game takes over (I think Guybrush remarks “Aha!”) and finishes the sequence without making the player physically click 100 times to accomplish it.

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I like really the concept of “when all elements are known/gathered” the puzzle is automatically solved, albeit on the coding side can be an ugly chain of ANDs (but I’m toying with the idea of “perverting” the CASE construct, in a manner that the default is the actual success, but few IF languages have the CASE construct or similiar)

Best regards frpm Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

just curious, what software did you use to make the dependency chart?

GraphViz is my go-to! You can use it from the command line, or online.

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