Dilemma Over Presentation of a Game Mechanic

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I'm working on some of the game mechanics for Starfall, the 3D puzzle adventure game I'm still developing in some of my spare time, and I've hit a rather controversial one, by today's standards of implementation. The idea is that throughout the game, the player will come across in-game texts that provide insight into the game worlds' lore and also grant certain abilities that allow the player to actively manipulate the game environments to help solve different puzzles. The ability system is based on ideograms, which can be seen in-game in the texts and in a few other places. The story-basis for the mechanic comes from the idea that the player-character is learning to recognize and use a new written language as they encounter these texts and ideograms, and I want the player to feel like they're learning to recognize and use the language at the same time, to help identify with the character.

The problem is in the implementation and presentation of such a system. I have two different ideas for it, so far:

1. Appeal the lowest common denominator: After reading an in-game text, the game notifies the player that a new ability has been gained. Abilities are stored in a menu that shows all the currently available abilities, and provides information about each one and an explanation of what it does.
   
2. Make the player think and make decisions for themselves: After reading an in-game text, there is no notification of having gained a new ability, and the ability menu has no extra information on the abilities available, leaving the player to keep their own notes on which ideogram does what, and when and where to use it.

I remember that when Myst first shipped, it came with it's own notepad, to allow players to keep their own notes on the puzzles they encountered. In today's game industry, that's an almost unthinkable thing to do, and nearly a taboo, in a lot of ways. I mean, god forbid, you actually make your players think critically and have to make notes in order to remember things they've encountered in your game...

So, I'm collecting opinions on which implementation of the mechanic people might appreciate more; because while I like the idea of having to keep notes and study in order to learn a new written language in a game, I know there are people out there who would want the game to basically teach it to them so they don't have to actively learn it.

Noobs and lesser experienced will appreciate 1 because it's easier on them to play the game and get the hang of it.

More experienced may appreciate 1 if there is a lot of info to track so they wouldn't be overwhelmed, but may appreciate 2 if there is little info to track and they won't get overwhelmed.

Veteran and hardcore rpg'ers will want 2, unless they are lazy, which I admit, I am.

I know myself that I would get overwhelmed if I had to take notes, and I struggle with D&D 3.5 which is what my gaming group plays. I did a one-shot with three friends last night, and it wasn't to note lite, but I've played before where it was very note intensive, and I am lacking in that department even with my gaming experience.

So I'd gear it towards your target level play, or do both with a rule change switching from one to the other if possible.

Maybe make it optional to switch between the two, or find some kind of compromise?

I would say go with number 1, and I say this as someone who always prefers difficulty over easy games.

Simply making information harder to keep track of does not actually increase the difficulty of the game in question.... at best, it causes what I often call "fake difficulty".... look up the term on TVTropes if you dont know what I mean. Generally though, it's something that's always best avoided if at all possible.

Instead, it merely increases the time-sink. Proper puzzles and such requiring lots of careful thought can be done just fine without having to resort to stuff like this. And one of the best rules of design I can think of is to always always always make sure that the player has good access to information that may be necessary to get through the game. Stat screens in an RPG, for instance. Some RPGs prefer to keep this stuff hidden, for various rather dopey reasons, but all that does is make things tougher on the player in the wrong ways. Having those stats be easily viewed, however, can help the player plan out what they need to do to improve their character in the right way to proceed. And while you could argue "Well, hiding it though means there's more challenge because it's harder to tell what to do", in most cases this is not actually true. Usually, when a game does this sort of thing, players will simply turn to resources that exist outside of the game, such as FAQs or tools/utilities that enable them to find the info they want. This isnt actually difficult or challenging for them to do, it ONLY takes time, and nothing more.

On top of that.... if the player always has easy access to info, it also prevents situations where the player dies and then says "Well the game never even told me about such-and-such! How was I ever supposed to know?", and they'd be right. With that easy info though, it's more about how the player USES that info; if they make a mistake with it, it's THEIR mistake, and that's the right way for it to happen.


So.... yeah. Some brief thoughts on that. I'll stop rambling here lest I start making even less sense than usual.

The logical solution is to have a hand-holding tutorial and then gradually turn up the difficulty to the point where the player is taking notes and drawing maps.

I think a hand-holding tutorial would deter the kind of people who enjoy taking notes on every aspect of a game.
Whereas the gradual progression towards not tracking anything within the game would eventually deter the people who made it through the hand-holding tutorial.

Who is the target audience for the game ?

I really agree with what Misery said. If your game fails to give someone the tools to record information they need to know about a game mechanic, they will resort to guides or they might just give up. I feel like it's entirely possible for there to be a clever compromise between the two options that avoids making things too obvious but will allow clever players to figure things out and keep track of that information within the confines of the game mechanics. The challenge should be in the game, not the game itself, if can you understand my meaning. And also, forcing players to keep real life notes is ridiculous since anyone that plays video games to, y'know, play video games will most likely feel like the game is purposely refusing to provide one of the tools needed to beat it. The last thing you want to do is make the player feel like your game is purposely trying to waste their time.

I totally agree with this as well.
Whenever I encounter this happening again, I usually interpret it as poor game design.
This is more common in older games, which I interpret as then just not being designed quite as well as newer games.

For example, "Sword of Hope 2 " (Gameboy) had hopelessly convoluted square-grid maps for all of the areas, and there was no way to get through the game without making a bunch of maps on squared paper to keep track of progress. Compared to the newer game "Etryssian Odyssey (3DS)" which maps the game as you progress, the Sword of Hope 2 game just seemed to be badly designed.

I also found it stupendously annoying that the game developers insisted on abbreviating all of the weapon and equipment names to 8 characters... because yu often couldn't even tell what the hell they were meant to be from the letter salad names, and there were no explanations for what each piece of equipment actually did beyond the basic raising or lowering of basic statistics like "strength" or "defence". So you'd find out in battle that actually this one shield would sometimes deflect attacks... and if you never stopped in the middle of a fight to write that down then you'd inevitably forget again. And there were a bunch of spells which honestly I don't even know what some of them even did.... again, you had to try them out in a fight as it's not obvious what any of them do. I ended up just using an internet guide to keep track of the spells. It was a very badly made game, and there is a good reason that games do not often follow this sort of "half of the information missing" structure nowadays.

I remember having to bust out the pen and paper to penetrate some of the more cryptic puzzles in Silent Hill 2. Honestly, it was a lot of fun.

I needed use a pen and paper to do a few of the puzzles in Virtue's Last Reward, and that was enjoyable ; but I think that's a different kind of thing from if a game just doesn't seem to keep track of things properly when most gamers would agree that it would be a big improvement if it did.

Well, it's not very useful to discuss which option would be best until we know who the target audience would be anyway.

I'm aiming for a target audience of people who enjoy adventure-puzzle games like the Myst series (particularly, RealMyst and Myst IV and V) who're probably in their late teens, anywhere in their 20s, and even into their early 30s. I'm also taking care to do my best to make it appeal to both genders about equally, in terms of gameplay, story and characters.

One thing to keep in mind is trends within that genre as they are currently; most of this sort of game these days, likely doesnt force players to use pen-n-paper at all, because otherwise they'd have a bloody hard time attracting players. And in an overall sense, they have a hard enough time as it is. Mainstream gamers in particular often dont even know what the genre is, or that it exists.

Even games like Myst are often considered to be the sort that are usually "viewed with rose-tinted glasses", if you know what that means. Myst's ultra-cryptic, unhelpful design made sense for one reason: The time it was made. Some games were like that back then, generally not on purpose, but just because things overall hadnt developed far enough to create better trends and ideas. And there's reasons why that old way of doing it just doesnt really exist anymore.

I agree with Misery's first post.

And please, no handholding tutorials. Those are the worst >_<

Blame that on localization In Japanese games, they can say a lot more with 8 or less characters of Kanji than they could with romanji, since, from what I understand, one symbol is a syllable.

Expanding that was a lot of work back then, since they'd need to expand the actual size of the game (which means putting it on a more expensive memory chip), or fill up what little empty space they could find, and/or cut out other things...rearrange the data...just dumb down the text in general...which is what most games back then did.

Also, most games didn't use variable width fonts, so fitting extra text in there meant they'd have to get rid of double spacing, or make the text windows bigger, or maybe come up with a routine to increase the length of the conversation...and you're talking about a GB game, so there's already very little text space to begin with.

I'm going to stop rambling now.

Given the space restrictions, age and generally budget nature of the game, perhaps it would be more likely that the Japanese version used katakana and hiragana alphabets rather than including a bank of kanji characters.

I would say that considering how much information can fit into other games such as Great Greed or Zelda.... it's truly an unfortunate to see how little text the developers managed to fit into Sword of Hope 2.
Even now, I'm still not entirely sure what a SHD HTHZ was supposed to be (some sort of shield I guess... but beyond that who knows.)

It took the developers 4 years to localise it in english... so my guess is that they never originally intended for it to be released in english, and made that decision only later.

^^ The point of the handholding tutorial is to give people enough time to decide that they like the game, before dropping them into the nine hells

It depends on many factors.

Who your target audience is. You say it's the puzzle people. That good; I assume you know your target audience because you are this type of person. Also understand that the market for this kind of game is fairly small. So if you’re trying to sell the product, your marketable audience will be small to start with. No doubt someone out there will love it.

Marketability. Myst was a beautifully rendered puzzle and visual extravaganza. If you're making something like that, than there is certainly a market out there that loves it.

Myself, I would try to implement some sort of difficulty slider. One that is adjustable during game play, plus a hint mode (maybe uses up lives or something). Allow the player to choose his game style if at all possible. This is the one feature I wish more games implemented on a broader sliding scale. The Easy, Standard and Hard modes are not sufficient resolution for my liking.