To the two of you above; while I don't personally enjoy 2D/Indie/Platformer stuff, I can see you guys have put a hella amount of dedication and effort in, so congratulation on getting as far as you have with your projects, and do keep it up.
One of the nice things about making games is that you get to play games and call it research.
I decided to get my head around how others approached the challenge of making detective games, to find the negatives/positives, and without LA Noire in my library, I instead opted for
Murdered: Soul Suspect.
It's a pretty cool game, but there's some outstanding issues which I now know I'll need to address;
- Questions: MSS does a pretty poor job of asking the right questions. The game often gives you a screen with a question at the top and some images down below, and you have to select whichever images are relevant to answering the question. Sometime it's multiple-choice, sometimes you have to get it in the right order, and other times you just need to find a single one. There's even a (poorly done) 3 Strike system, and while I haven't found a penalty, the game seems to be pushing you to try and get the right answer on the first try, which one would think goes against the very point of games trying to teach you to do better through practice and experimentation.
My biggest issue with this is that often the questions are so limited and somewhat irrelevant to the case you're investigating, it often feels like you have to blindly guess what's correct. I don't feel "right" when I answer or that I'm understanding the situation better, I just feel like I got lucky, and that's a horrible thing for games to project on their players. The game keeps compounding in new questions half-way through an investigation, and they go against the logic I was using to find the answer. Not every person thinks the same, and most games recognise this.
Detective games need to be extremely clear about WHAT the player needs to find out and WHY they should care; the HOW, WHERE and WHO should be part of the investigation process. To this end, the game shouldn't throw random questions in the middle of the investigation to confuse and distract the player, even if the game designer feels they're relevant. Keep It Simple Stupid.
- Stealth/Contradictory Mechanics: In MSS, you're the ghost of a dead detective come back to find your killer. This introduces a lot of really cool mechanics and rules, but they opted to include one mechanic I really dislike; an awful stealth system. In certain areas of the game there are "Demons", and they are practically invincible and will come to kill you if they spot you. In order to kill them, you need to get behind them and complete a QTE. In order to evade them, you have to rush into these hiding spots and jump around until you're not being followed any more.
The mechanic feels extremely out of place in this game; it feels like, in the absence of other failure states (we'll get there), they scrambled to find some kind of challenge they could add, but they went with one that was completely contradictory to everything inside the game already. The mechanic isn't fun because it has no relation to the atmosphere of the game or the other mechanics and it feels like a tedious chore as there's usually a limited number of these goons around the place.
A good game focuses on a specific goal, and all the mechanics either help or hinder towards that goal. When a mechanic has no relation to everything else you're doing and doesn't help or hinder your progression line, it comes off as annoying or disjointed. True enough, people have actually made tutorials on how to modify your save files to disable the demons completely, and that's a pretty bad sign in and of itself.
- Lack of Challenge/Failure States: As I've taught in the past, games are fun because they teach us to overcome challenges, and for that our body rewards us with dopamine which makes us happy. Challenge is a necessary part of making games more than just temporary distractions from boredom. Failure States are one part of challenge; while I disagree with Total Biscuit that they're necessary beyond other challenge types, I do believe that the ability to be punished for failure is absolutely crucial in great games, as a player needs to be told that they're doing something wrong so that they can improve and do it right.
If we ignore the stealth mechanics, MSS' approach to challenge is pretty poor. The game has a lot of number figures for 100% Completionists, but if you're not one of those kinds of players, then the game will seem very basic for you. The majority of the challenge comes from those questions I mentioned above, and to correctly answer most of those questions, you need to simply run around the room, waiting for the highlight/prompt button to appear so you can collect some evidence. There are a few questions which are completely independent of evidence and are based on logic, but in either case, as I said before, the questions are flawed and can feel "random", which removes the entire element of challenge as the player doesn't have that feeling of skill progression.
Every game needs to have some challenge which tests the player and pushes them to keep trying until they get it right. If I'm to make a good Detective game, it's super crucial that I find a way of challenging the player and letting them fail without frustrating them because they didn't understand the scenario and without making them bored because the puzzles are too easy.
- Lack of Replayability: This one should be the easiest to explain; the game lacks any functionality to randomise the puzzles or alter the experience to create an element of unpredictability. This ultimately means that the game will eventually become boring to the player if they try and replay it, as they'll already know all the answers and won't learn anything new from the experience.
Keeping all of this in mind, I've had some ideas on how to improve the experience for my game. I'm now currently finishing up preliminary design draft on the Demo puzzle; that is, all the evidence, dialogue, questions and so forth that I'll need to do. I've decided to keep the demo area small, and so you'll have only two roads and two houses you can enter. The game is also no longer First Person, and you will need to switch through some static cameras placed around the level - this will encourage players to focus on the evidence and how it all ties into the chain of events, rather than get stuck on physics bugs or whatever.
I'm hoping I can get a really stuffty playable blockout level done in the next few weeks.
