A Glimpse into Design: Dev Log #2

It's that time of the month again where we share a little insights on what goes on behind the scenes in our little indie: Broccoli Bunny Studios!

Thanks to everyone who has played our demo build at Doujima! Since then, we have managed to polish up on it with everyone's feedback and we're gearing up to launch the improved demo to Steam next month!

Now let's talk about the design that goes behind the puzzles.

For designing our stages, I take a lot of my inspirations from both old and new media and of all different kinds of mediums, whether its games, TV shows or even anime. I totally recommend doing the same thing if you're trying to get some ideas for your own stories or games!

Creating a Detective Game in particular made me realise that there are 2 distinct types of Detective Games:

Story Focused and Puzzle Focused

and we first needed to establish which one of these games Detective Hindsight would be.

Story Focused:

Story Focused or Narrative Focused Detective Games are what I classify games which use the concept of solving cases to wrap around an overarching story. The solving in question can also be brute forced in terms of restarting from the last save point (for example, giving the wrong evidence in Ace Attorney). In these games, the solving of a puzzle is more of a story beat instead of something that the Player needs to jump through some hoops in logic for.

Puzzle Focused:

Puzzle Focused Detective Games are what I classify as games with a "skill gate" that Players can only pass if they can understand or discover the vital clue in the mystery. Granted, you may argue that Story Focused games can also be included in this category, but those games usually have 1 question posed to the Player at a time that requires a shallow level of understanding during that line of questioning.

Puzzle Focused games have a more complex structure, where the Player has to go through their own thought process to piece together the case and prove to the game that they know enough to continue. Games like these include the Golden Idol series as well as Chants of Senaar.

So now what?

The inspiration behind Detective Hindsight was in fact the Golden Idol series, so I wanted to tweak it more towards the Puzzle Focused Detective Game genre. Making around 3 to 4 puzzles in the prototyping phase, these are the lessons that I learnt along the way.

The Magic Number 7

Early on, I realised that many of my puzzles had a large number of rooms, with many items in each room. This was easy to track for me because I had my notebook out and all the red herrings, actual clues and useless information on the same page. But for Players during my first few playtesting sessions, the information overload was way too much.

So to fix this, I tweaked the puzzles to only have vital information or red herrings. Having useless information that doesn't affect the story may feel nice as a bonus to the Player or is thematic, but it takes away more of the Player's attention which makes the whole experience less overwhelming.

Layers of Hard

A very interesting concept that came up was also the idea of different kinds of difficulty. Something that game designers probably don't actively think about for puzzles is how many layers or steps does the player go through in order to reach the correct conclusion.

For example, if someone was poisoned at the table, the designer can make the Player look through many different order slips (foreshadowing for later cases) and the Player must then figure out which dish is poisoned by looking at similarities between what people ate. This contrasts to puzzles which may only have 1 layer like deciphering a paragraph of code words: The information is in one place and the Player just needs to crack it.

A good mixture of different puzzles seemed to work well for the cases that most Players liked.

The Eureka Moment

The final lesson I learnt when making these puzzles is to start from the end. At first I had a whole mind-map of logic spanning from Players need to get information A, B and ignore red herring C to Player will then discover that the water was poisoned! But this straight forward mindset led to the more boring puzzles that people did not seem to enjoy. I instead began designing puzzles from the back, where I know what I want the Player to feel when solving the puzzle, and then lay the breadcrumbs towards the final answer.

Well...

That's all from now! Phew! It was nice penning down some of these game design thoughts to share with you, the reader. Stay tuned next month while we try and cook up some new features and stories and cases and...arcade games?

~ Kenneth from Broccoli Bunny Studios