Puzzles

Let’s be frank: This Handbook is notgoing to tell you everything you might want to know about writing puzzles. For one thing, clever authors keep dreaming up new possibilities! But puzzles are such a big part of interactive fiction that a book on how to write IF using Inform can’t neglect them entirely.

A few works of IF have been written that have no puzzles. In a work of this sort, the player wanders around, looking at things and/or conversing with characters, but there are no obstacles to movement or action. The whole of the story is available, and no special smarts or problem-solving are needed to read it. At one time there was a competition, the IF Art Show, dedicated to this type of game.

Even in a story with no actual puzzles, the player may be able to make choices. These choices may affect the outcome of the story: The author might write five or six branching story lines, and the player might have to play the game a number of times to be sure of not missing anything important, or to understand what the author had in mind. But if the story is free of puzzles, we would expect that any of the choices would be easy to find. It would be easy to move down any of the branches of the story.

In most IF, though, the player has to exercise some brain power to do things that will move the story forward. The player who can’t figure out what to do next is stuck. A player who is stuck can wander around in the world of the story for an hour, trying things that don’t produce any results and getting more and more frustrated.

When the player does figure out how to solve a puzzle, there is usually a reward of some kind. A new object might become available (something the player will need to attack another puzzle), a new treasure be discovered, and a new room or region of the map open up. In games that keep score (see Chapter 7), the player should earn points for solving each puzzle. You may want to set up a scoring system that will award more points for solving the most difficult puzzles, and fewer points for solving the easier ones. Of course, players may not agree with you about which puzzles are easy and which are hard!

For details on the types of puzzles you’re likely to find when playing IF, or likely to want to implement, see Chapter 6, “Puzzles.”