#003: Icons, Polygons, and Tools — Your Contract with the Player

Icons, Polygons, and Tools: Your Contract with the Player

Adventure for Ren'Py gives you the tools you need to make any genre of Point-and-Click Game.  From a Film Noir-style Hard-Boiled Detective like Déjà Vu with a three-act plot, to a Turn-Based Dating Simulator.

We have therefore given you enough tools to potentially create a mess.  This article, part of our How-To Guide series, is here to help you sort that mess out.

Understanding Your Genre

In a Detective Game, which is a literary form of puzzle, and was the earliest successful form of Visual Novel, players are going to be expecting to use their brains.  This leads to certain principles:

1. Don’t solve puzzles for the player that the player should solve on their own. The thrill of playing a mystery or detective game is the chance to solve the mystery intellectually before the game reveals the solution.
2. Guide the character along the route to finding clues.  If your world is too open and doesn’t provide enough direction or guidance, it can be possible for the player to miss critical clues that are neccessary to lead them along the intellectual path towards a solution.
3. Sometimes a theory is better than a confirmed solution.  The player can string together theories based on the clues, but you don’t always need to provide a game mechanic for them to check their theory.  Sometimes holding off until later can keep them more invested.
4. Don’t waste the player’s time!  While it’s a good idea to add colorful descriptive texts to all significant items in a scene, you should maintain a rule that no such descriptions will be critical to succeeding in the game unless you’ve done something to draw the player’s attention to that particular item.  This could be a strange scrawl across a wall in the artwork, or a comment made by another character in game, or a situation that leaves the player with no option but to explore, such as being locked in a room where the Go and Say tools are useless, and the only items to use the Operate tool on also prove to be useless—leading to no other choice but to use the Examine tool.  If you break the expectation, and put critical tools in unlikely places, only able to be discovered with the Examine tool, then the player will be doomed to spend all of their time clicking Examine on everything, which is likely to be less than fun.

In a Dating Simulator, by contrast, the expectations are very different:

1. Make operation of the game clear and obvious.  There shouldn't be guesswork about the basic operations of the game (moving between locations, conversing with other characters, buying items, viewing statistics, and so forth.)  Save the guess-work for the social interactions, because that is what the player is expected to use their intuition on.
2. Use verbal or visual cues to introduce changes in the current mode.  If you have mini-games, make them obvious.  For example, you could have a scene that says “Click where you’d like to look.” and then the other character could react differently depending on whether you make eye contact boldly, look away in a shy manner, or if your eyes drop to investigate their body or their expensive fashion accessories.  The important thing is that you give a clue to introduce this mode, where the user is expected to click “anywhere” since that is different from the rest of the game where you have established a system of obvious menu options and icons for them to choose.

The Importance of the Investigative Sequence

This section is for all games, not just Detective games, so don’t skip it—

I like to think of actions in order of their potential permanent impact on the progress of the story:

1. The Examine tool should be non-commital.  You can look, listen, smell, taste, or read anything without causing the plot to progress forward.
2. The Say tool should be nearly non-commital, but should reflect some aspect of realistic conversation.  You can ask questions, and chit chat, but if you say something rude, or offensive, you might create a social impasse which could impact your further progress in some way.
3. The Operate tool is much more serious.  If you open a door, take an item, or pull a lever, you could cause the plot to move forward in some way.  Of course, depending on what is being operated upon, this might be of similar risk to the Say tool.  And, opening a medicine cabinet while you are inside of a closed bathroom is obviously less likely to derail the plot than striking up a conversation with a thug in a back alley, so common sense must be employed.
4. The Go tool is the most serious of all.  You never know who you will run into in a location that you haven’t stepped into before, and you also never know how hard it will be to find your way back, if it is possible to do so at all.  Some “Go” options are less risky, such as moving between your study and your kitchen, but others could be irreversible, such as entering a mysterious Limousine.

Sometimes we may choose to put a Verb Icon onto a layer where it isn’t normally found.  This is done in order to maintain our implied contract with the player established by the options on the toolbar:

For example, if there is a mysterious powder on the coffee table, the risk of tasting it is higher than tasting a slice of birthday cake, because it might turn out to be a powerful drug.  In this case, putting the taste icon on the Operate layer instead of the Examine layer is a way to indicate to the player that this action is more powerful than a mere observation, and also likely to impact the plot.  The Examine layer, in this case, should have a sight-based observation such as, “There is a mysterious white powder on the coffee table.  I wonder if it’s Coffee Mate, or cocaine?”

Use of Event Icons

Future versions of Adventure will allow you to mark certain interactions with an exclamation mark icon indicating that the action will kick-off a Storyline Event.

This icon is also available any time a Choice Menu is presented to the player, and may be added to any menu option by including the magic tag {event} at the beginning of that option’s display text.  These icons are intended to signal that choosing that interaction will exit “Free Roam” mode and move forward in the main (or, secondary) plot of the story—potentially with no ability to return to this mode again.  It gives players with a “100% completionist” gameplay style a chance to thoroughly explore before they step into a point of no return.  The opposite of this is the {cancel} tag, which appears as a grey X, and indicates that the choice will back out and return to the “Free Roam” mode with little to no interaction at all, allowing them to come back to the Choice Menu at a later time.

In Conclusion

By maintaining a consistent set of rules on how you utilize the layers, polygons, and icons, you can establish a non-verbal contract with the player, building their confidence and trust as they play your game, maximizing the fun, and reducing frustration.  If you are just beginning to design your game, it’s worth your time to think these concepts through in advance, and write out your set of rules.   If you’ve already started, it may be worthwhile to review what you’ve done so far, and look for inconsistencies, or potential frustration points for players, and make corrections as needed.

I know this was less of a hands-on How-To Guide than the previous entries in the series, but you will need to have these decisions in mind in order to make the right decisions in the next entry in this series, which will be about setting up your game’s Toolbar.