The Craft of Adventure - Part 4
       Five articles on the design of adventure games
                       Graham Nelson

@~Continued from last issue

                      --- Research ---

Design usually begins with, and is periodically interrupted by,
research.  This can be the most entertaining part of the project
and is certainly the most rewarding, not so much because factual
accuracy matters (it doesn't) but because it continually sparks
off ideas.

A decent town library, for instance, contains thousands of maps of
one kind or another if one knows where to look: deck plans of
Napoleonic warships, small-scale contour maps of mountain passes,
city plans of New York and ancient Thebes, the layout of the U.S.
Congress.  There will be photographs of every conceivable kind of
terrain, of most species of animals and plants; cutaway drawings
of a 747 airliner and a domestic fridge; shelves full of the
collected paintings of every great artist from the Renaissance
onwards.  Data is available on the melting point of tungsten, the
distances and spectral types of the nearest two dozen stars,
journey times by rail and road across France.

History crowds with fugitive tales.  Finding an eyewitness account
is always a pleasure: for instance,

     As we ranged by Gratiosa, on the tenth of September, about
     twelve a clocke at night, we saw a large and perfect Rainbow
     by the Moone light, in the bignesse and forme of all other
     Rainbows, but in colour much differing, for it was more
     whitish, but chiefly inclining to the colour of the flame of
     fire.

     (Described by the ordinary seaman Arthur Gorges aboard Sir
     Walter Raleigh's expedition of 1597.)


Then, too, useful raw materials come to hand.  A book about Tibet
may mention, in passing, the way to make tea with a charcoal-
burning samovar.  So, why not a tea-making puzzle somewhere?  It
doesn't matter that there is as yet no plot to fit it into: if
it's in keeping with the genre, it will fit somewhere.

Research also usefully fills in gaps.  Suppose a fire station is
to be created: what are the rooms?  A garage, a lounge, a room
full of uniforms, yes: but what else?  Here is Stu Galley, on
writing the Chandleresque murder mystery `Witness':

     Soon my office bookshelf had an old Sears catalogue and a
     pictorial history of advertising (to help me furnish the
     house and clothe the characters), the "Dictionary of American
     Slang" (to add colour to the text) and a 1937 desk
     encyclopaedia (to weed out anachronisms).

The result (overdone but hugely amusing) is that one proceeds up
the peastone drive of the Linder house to meet (for instance)
Monica, who has dark waved hair and wears a navy Rayon blouse, tan
slacks and tan pumps with Cuban heels.  She then treats you like a
masher who just gave her a whistle.

On the other hand, the peril of research is that it piles up fact
without end.  It is essential to condense.  Here Brian Moriarty, on
research for `Trinity', which went as far as geological surveys:

     The first thing I did was sit down and make a map of the
     Trinity site. It was changed about 50 times trying to
     simplify it and get it down from over 100 rooms to the 40 or
     so rooms that now comprise it. It was a lot more accurate and
     very detailed, but a lot of that detail was totally useless.

There is no need to implement ten side-chapels when coding, say,
Chartres cathedral, merely because the real one has ten.

                    --- The Overture ---

At this point the designer has a few photocopied sheets, some
scribbled ideas and perhaps even a little code - the
implementation of a samovar, for instance - but nothing else.
(There's no harm in sketching details before having the whole
design worked out: painters often do.  Besides, it can be very
dispiriting looking at a huge paper plan of which nothing whatever
is yet programmed.) It is time for a plot.

Plot begins with the opening message, rather the way an episode of
Star Trek begins before the credits come up.  Write it now.  It
ought to be striking and concise (not an effort to sit through,
like the title page of `Beyond Zork').  By and large Infocom were
good at this, and a fine example is Brian Moriarty's overture to
`Trinity':

     Sharp words between the superpowers. Tanks in East Berlin.
     And now, reports the BBC, rumours of a satellite blackout.
     It's enough to spoil your continental breakfast.

     But the world will have to wait. This is the last day of your
     $599 London Getaway Package, and you're determined to soak up
     as much of that authentic English ambience as you can. So
     you've left the tour bus behind, ditched the camera and
     escaped to Hyde Park for a contemplative stroll through the
     Kensington Gardens.

Already you know: who you are (an unadventurous American tourist,
of no consequence to the world); exactly where you are (Kensington
Gardens, Hyde Park, London, England); and what is going on (bad
news, I'm afraid: World War III is about to break out).  Notice
the careful details:  mention of the BBC, of continental
breakfasts, of the camera and the tour bus.  In style, the opening
of `Trinity' is escapism from a disastrous world out of control:
notice the way the first paragraph is in tense, blunt, headline-
like sentences, whereas the second is much more relaxed.  So a
good deal has been achieved in two paragraphs.

The point about telling the player who to be is more subtle than
first appears.  "What should you, the detective, do now?" asks
`Witness' pointedly on the first turn.  Gender is an especially
awkward point.  In some games the player's character is exactly
prescribed: in `Plundered Hearts' you are a particular girl
whisked away by pirates, and have to act in character.  Other
games take the attitude that anyone who turns up can play, as
themselves, with whatever gender or attitudes (and in a dull
enough game with no other characters, these don't even matter).

                   --- An Aim in Life ---

Once the player knows who he is, what is he to do?  Even if you
don't want him to know everything yet, he has to have some initial
task.

Games vary in how much they reveal at once.  `Trinity' is
foreboding but really only tells the player to go for a walk.
`Curses' gives the player an initial task which appears easy -
look through some attics for a tourist map of Paris - the
significance of which is only gradually revealed, in stages, as
the game proceeds.  (Not everyone likes this, and some players
have told me it took them a while to motivate themselves because
of it, but on balance I disagree.) Whereas even the best of "magic

realm" type games (such as `Enchanter') tends to begin with
something like:

     You, a novice Enchanter with but a few simple spells in your
     Book, must seek out Krill, explore the Castle he has
     overthrown, and learn his secrets.  Only then may his vast
     evil...

A play is nowadays sometimes said to be `a journey for the main
character', and there's something in this.  There's a tendency in
most games to make the protagonist terribly, terribly important,
albeit initially ordinary - the player sits down as Clark Kent,
and by the time the prologue has ended is wearing Superman's gown.
Presumably the idea is that it's more fun being Superman than Kent
(though I'm not so sure about this).

Anyway, the most common plots boil down to saving the world, by
exploring until eventually you vanquish something (`Lurking
Horror' again, for instance) or collecting some number of objects
hidden in awkward places (`Leather Goddesses' again, say).  The
latter can get very hackneyed (find the nine magic spoons of Zenda
to reunite the Kingdom...), so much so that it becomes a bit of a
joke (`Hollywood Hijinx') but still it isn't a bad idea, because
it enables many different problems to be open at once.

As an aside on saving the world, with which I suspect many fans of
`Dr Who' would agree: it's more interesting and dramatic to save a
small number of people (the mud-slide will wipe out the whole
village!) than the whole impersonal world (but Doctor, the
instability could blow up every star in the universe!).

In the same way, a game which involves really fleshed-out
characters other than the player will involve them in the plot and
the player's motives, which obviously opens many more
possibilities.

The ultimate aim at this stage is to be able to write a one-page
synopsis of what will happen in the full game (as is done when
pitching a film, and as Infocom did internally, according to
several sources): and this ought to have a clear structure.

                  --- Size and Density ---

Once upon a time, the sole measure of quality in advertisements
for adventure games was the number of rooms.  Even quite small
programs would have 200 rooms, which meant only minimal room
descriptions and simple puzzles which were scattered thinly over
the map.  (The Level 9 game `Snowball' - perhaps their best, and
now perhaps almost lost - cheekily advertised itself as having
2,000,000 rooms... though 1,999,800 of them were quite similar to
each other.)

Nowadays a healthier principle has been adopted: that (barring a
few junctions and corridors) there should be something out of the
ordinary about every room.

One reason for the quality of the Infocom games is that their
roots were in a format which enforced a high density.  In their
formative years there was an absolute ceiling of 255 objects,
which needs to cover rooms, objects and many other things (e.g.,
compass directions and spells).  Some writers were slacker than
others (Steve Meretzky, for example) but there simply wasn't room
for great boring stretches.  An object limit can be a blessing as
well as a curse.  (And the same applies to some extent to the
Scott Adams games, whose format obliged extreme economy on number
of rooms and objects but coded rules and what we would now call
daemons so efficiently that the resulting games tend to have very
tightly interlinked puzzles and objects, full of side-effects and
multiple uses.)

Let us consider the earlier Infocom format as an example of
setting a budget.  Many `objects' are not portable: walls,
tapestries, thrones, control panels, coal-grinding machines.  As a
rule of thumb, four objects to one room is to be expected: so we
might allocate, say, 60 rooms.  Of the remaining 200 objects, one
can expect 15-20 to be used up by the game's administration (e.g.,
in an Infocom game these might be a "Darkness" room, 12 compass
directions, the player and so on).  Another 50-75 or so objects
may be portable but the largest number, at least 100, will be
furniture.

Similarly there used to be room for at most 150K of text.  This is
the equivalent of about a quarter of a modern novel, or, put
another way, enough bytes to store a very substantial book of
poetry.  Roughly, it meant spending 2K of text (about 350 words)
in each room - ten times the level of detail of the original
mainframe Adventure.

Most adventure-compilers are fairly flexible about resources
nowadays (certainly TADS and Inform are), and this means that a
rigorous budget is not absolutely needed.  Nonetheless, a plan can
be helpful and can help to keep a game in proportion.  If a game
of 60 rooms is intended, how will they be divided up among the
stages of the game?  Is the plan too ambitious, or too meek?

                    --- The Prologue ---

Just as most Hollywood films are three-act plays (following a
convention abandoned decades ago by the theatre), so there is a
conventional game structure.

Most games have a prologue, a middle game and an end game, usually
quite closed off from each other.  Once one of these phases has
been left, it generally cannot be returned to (though there is
sometimes a reprise at the end, or a premonition at the
beginning): the player is always going `further up, and further
in', like the children entering Narnia.

The prologue has two vital duties.  Firstly, it has to establish
an atmosphere, and give out a little background information.

To this end the original `Adventure' had the above-ground
landscape; the fact that it was there gave a much greater sense of
claustrophobia and depth to the underground bulk of the game.
Similarly, most games begin with something relatively mundane (the
guild-house in `Sorcerer', Kensington Gardens in `Trinity') or
else they include the exotic with dream-sequences (`The Lurking
Horror').  Seldom is a player dropped in at the deep end (as
`Plundered Hearts', which splendidly begins amid a sea battle).

The other duty is to attract a player enough to make her carry on
playing.  It's worth imagining that the player is only toying with
the game at this stage, and isn't drawing a map or being at all
careful.  If the prologue is big, the player will quickly get lost
and give up.  If it is too hard, then many players simply won't
reach the middle game.

Perhaps eight to ten rooms is the largest a prologue ought to be,
and even then it should have a simple (easily remembered) map
layout.  The player can pick up a few useful items - the
traditional bottle, lamp and key, whatever they may be in this
game - and set out on the journey by one means or another.

                  --- The Middle Game ---

The middle game is both the largest and the one which least needs
detailed planning in advance, oddly enough, because it is the one
which comes nearest to being a collection of puzzles.


There may be 50 or so locations in the middle game.  How are they
to be divided up?  Will there be one huge landscape, or will it
divide into zones?  Here, designers often try to impose some
coherency by making symmetrical patterns: areas corresponding to
the four winds, or the twelve signs of the Zodiac, for instance.
Gaining access to these areas, one by one, provides a sequence of
problems and rewards for the player.

Perhaps the fundamental question is: wide or narrow?  How much
will be visible at once?

Some games, such as the original Adventure, are very wide:  there
are thirty or so puzzles, all easily available, none leading to
each other.  Others, such as `Spellbreaker', are very narrow: a
long sequence of puzzles, each of which leads only to a chance to
solve the next.

A compromise is probably best.  Wide games are not very
interesting (and annoyingly unrewarding since one knows that a
problem solved cannot transform the landscape), while narrow ones
can in a way be easy: if only one puzzle is available at a time,
the player will just concentrate on it, and will not be held up by
trying to use objects which are provided for different puzzles.

Just as the number of locations can be divided into rough classes
at this stage, so can the number of (portable) objects.  In most
games, there are a few families of objects: the cubes and scrolls
in `Spellbreaker', the rods and Tarot cards in `Curses' and so on.
These are to be scattered about the map, of course, and found one
by one by a player who will come to value them highly.  The really
important rules of the game to work out at this stage are those to
do with these families of objects.  What are they for?  Is there a
special way to use them?  And these are the first puzzles to
implement.

So a first-draft design of the middle game may just consist of a
rough sketch of a map divided into zones, with an idea for some
event or meeting to take place in each, together with some general
ideas for objects.  Slotting actual puzzles in can come later.

                    --- The End Game ---

Some end games are small (`The Lurking Horror' or `Sorcerer' for
instance), others huge (the master game in `Zork', now called
`Zork III').  Almost all games have one.

End games serve two purposes.  Firstly they give the player a
sense of being near to success, and can be used to culminate the
plot, to reveal the game's secrets.  This is obvious enough.  They
also serve to stop the final stage of the game from being too
hard.

As a designer, you don't usually want the last step to be too
difficult; you want to give the player the satisfaction of
finishing, as a reward for having got through the game.  (But of
course you want to make him work for it.) An end game helps by
narrowing the game, so that only a few rooms and objects are
accessible.


In a novelist's last chapter, ends are always tied up
(suspiciously neatly compared with real life - Jane Austen being a
particular offender, though always in the interests of humour).
The characters are all sent off with their fates worked out and
issues which cropped up from time to time are settled.  So should
the end game be.  Looking back, as if you were a winning player,
do you understand why everything that happened did?  (Of course,
some questions will forever remain dark.  Who did kill the
chauffeur in `The Big Sleep'?)

Most stories have a decisive end.  The old Gothic manor house
burns down, the alien invaders are poisoned, the evil warlord is
deposed.  If the end game lacks such an event, perhaps it is
insufficiently final.

Above all, what happens to the player's character, when the
adventure ends?

The final message is also an important one to write carefully,
and, like the overture, the coda should be brief.  To quote
examples here would only spoil their games.  But a good rule of
thumb, as any film screenplay writer will testify, seems to be to
make the two scenes which open and close the story "book-ends" for
each other: in some way symmetrical and matching.

@~To be continued in Issue 73













                              - o -