Good Minipuzzle Examples

A couple weeks ago I made a post about minipuzzles, and one thing I left open was how to make good minipuzzles. I'm going to talk about that today, but first I want to summarize what I've said earlier about terminology.

Terminology

Many console and computer games have minigames, like a section within a platformer game where you play a shooter for a few minutes and then go back to normal platformer gameplay. I'm not talking about those.

When I say puzzle I mean what I said about the difference between puzzles and games: they both have goals but puzzles are static whereas games are dynamic, either through randomness or by having an opponent.

Minipuzzles are often not separate activities within their game, and minigames often are. I've mentioned the station-placement and track-layout minigames in train-building sim/tycoon games. Placing a station is a normal part of gameplay. Calling it a minipuzzle calls attention to the fact that there's a subgoal in play -- that you can ignore the rest of the game for a moment and focus on one small puzzle: how does the player place this new game element in order to maximize future score and minimize up-front cost?

Subgoals

That hints at one of the critical factors in good minipuzzles. The station-placement minipuzzle challenges the player to compare up-front cost and future score. The player is making a strategic decision -- should he spend more now to make more later, or are his current funds tight enough that he will just take a cheap solution instead? Is this one particular station important enough to his future plans that he needs to be careful in placement? The conflict between cost-now and revenue-later is a common strategic element.

Making it a good puzzle demands making the decision difficult. If the player can trivially choose the solution to a cost/revenue puzzle, then the decision doesn't add much to gameplay. The question shouldn't be just one of "A or B," as I'm describing it here. The station-placement minipuzzle actually asks the player where to place the station among dozens of possible choices. One placement will capture more big buildings in the town but cost more; another blocks an important road; a third captures a couple big buildings but requires the destruction of another.

Design Your Own

But what about your game? I figure the best way to describe how to add minipuzzles is by example.

I was working on a city-building game recently, and decided I wanted to put some minipuzzle-type ideas into it. City-building was already on a grid, so I had a great start. With a wide range of choices, a player might choose a solution randomly, or based on aesthetics. Limiting the choices gives the player an easier chance to apply a metric to his decisions. I'm reminded of Mark Lepper's research into choice: give people too many choices and they're always unhappy, thinking they didn't choose the best outcome. Like a 401k that offers you hundreds of possible investments, or a an insurance plan with dozens and dozens of options. How can you evaluate them all? You can't, and the result is a nagging feeling that you chose poorly. I've used my buddy Antoine's quote before and it's fitting here, too: "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to remove." Make the puzzle simple and limit the player's choices.

OK, so you've got a grid, or some other mechanism for restricting choice, now what? A friend pointed me to Medieval Conquest recently, and the game CD had a demo for School Tycoon on it, so I played that briefly. At the beginning of the game, it's hard to tell what a good metric is for placement. Buildings go down on a grid, but it's very difficult to tell what makes for good placement. This is the second key: give the player a visible score. In Transport Tycoon, you can see the size of the catchment area that a station will give you, so you immediately have an idea of how much traffic the station will generate. You also see how much it'll cost you. By giving the player explicit metrics, they are left with the strategy choice of A or B as well as trying to find new arrangements within that limited grid that maximize their chosen balance, too. If School Tycoon had made some placements more expensive (say, by requiring the removal of trees or levelling ground), or included a mechanic that makes some placements more effective and easy to score, then I could have seen a puzzle there. As it is, building placement in that game seems random to me. What makes one placement better than another?

Hiding such factors from new players does add depth to the game -- experienced players will develop a sense for good placement, not just for one building but maybe for a cluster of them. However it removes placement as a minipuzzle. The game seems random to new players, and that means sometimes they'll have an easier time playing the game and other times it'll be harder, and they'll have no idea why. With challenge mismatched, they could be bored or frustrated, or switch from one extreme to the other from play-through to play-through. And then they hate your game, return it, and tell all their friends not to buy it, your publisher will start to hate you, and then your dog will die. :( This whole chain of events could be avoided by giving players an obvious building-placement score up front.

Let me switch genres here. There are elements of World of Warcraft that I consider minipuzzles. Farming mobs can be a puzzle: the goal is to maximize drops while minimizing downtime. The player considers drop rate, their own talents and gear versus that mob (which decides which particular mob they'll have the easiest time farming), and where the mob spawns are. The puzzle is to minimize downtime, either waiting for mob spawns or regenerating health or mana. There's a bit of randomness to this puzzle, so it is a bit game-like, but that's why I mention farming: over thirty minutes or an hour of farming that randomness disappears into noise. The player is left considering, "which of my abilities and in what order do I use them in order to maximize the number of drops that I get per hour?"

Here we have the first two elements: limited choice (the player only has so many spells and targets to choose from) and obvious score (kills per hour, which leads to drops per hour). But there's several subtle points here that makes this such an intriguing puzzle. Some abilities are obviously much better than others; very low-level spells don't pack enough punch to count and some creatures are resistant to certain spells.

But consider DOTs -- damage-over-time spells. They are often expensive to cast and they do a lot of damage, but getting maximum benefit from them means the target should be left alive for the spell to run its course. Throwing it on a creature early in a fight is better than later in a fight, but it's possible that the mob might die too quickly for it to matter anyway. The player might run out of mana after killing a few mobs because he's not making efficient use of mana. Each individual mob dies quickly, but the extra downtime means the player's kills-per-hour number goes down. The player has wound up chasing the wrong goal. At first glance, it's easy to assume that the faster you kill one mob, the faster you kill a hundred, but the addition of downtime complicates the equation. Maybe the best solution is to dot up a bunch of creatures and then run away and let the dots run their course!

This puzzle is interesting because of the interplay of several different game elements. One combat session -- killing one creature -- is the putative goal, but it can't be considered in isolation.

Conclusion

I don't think Chris Sawyer thought of station placement as a minipuzzle when he designed Transport Tycoon. I think the minipuzzle is a natural outgrowth of other design decisions made along the way. The same with World of Warcraft. Farming is a minor part of the game; it's not necessary to play it, and many people skip it completely.

Yet we can still analyze these games, see what was done well, and steal those ideas for our own.

In the next post in this series, I'll cover some minipuzzles that I tweaked in some of my own projects, and consider how I might change other games in order to emphasize the minipuzzles in them.

Mini-Puzzles

I've talked of minigames before, in my previous post about game theory, but when gamers say "minigame" they mean a complete game-within-a-game. Run around in a platformer, take control of a gun emplacement, play Tetris or Breakout or Artillery, break down a wall -- then go back to running around.

The station-placement "minigame" in Transport Tycoon is somewhat gamelike, but the score is ephemeral. There's no win or lose; there's just "better" and "worse", and those measures are fuzzy. I think of it as a puzzle, since there is no opponent, no time limit. There's a goal, and a rough measure of score, and that's it.

What's great about Transport Tycoon is there's a ton of these puzzles in the game. Station placement, track placement, route optimization, and building fast & efficient intersections ("junctions" in the parlance) are all puzzles. And I like puzzles. :) I've got a handful of Hanayama cast puzzles on my desk at work, burrs and other wooden puzzles at home, and I can solve a Rubik's cube. So the game fits me.

One of the main differences between mini-games and mini-puzzles is that the puzzles are integral to gameplay; they are almost meta-games, in that doing such puzzles well achieves a goal beyond what the game sets for you. There's a group of players obsessed with crafting elegant junctions -- both fast and eye-pleasing.

This is definitely the sort of mechanic that makes every game better. Not every player needs to enjoy it; seeing the creations of others is an incentive to try your own hand. These complex junctions are inspiring. As with seeing high-level players in WoW, or the high scores on your favorite XBLA game, knowing it is possible is encouragement to try it yourself. Whether it's jealousy or greed or curiosity or admiration that drives players to achieve the same power doesn't matter. Because your players want to play more.

Would you rather make a game that other designers rate highly, or a game that players love?

My answer is, clearly, the latter. I'm offended--morally offended--by designers that look at games like Myst or The Sims and say "I don't know why people like those games, they're so stupid." That's a topic in itself that I might discuss later but let's gloss over it for now.

Or maybe not. My point of view is not to make games because I want to express myself as a designer -- I want to make something that people will enjoy. Some money would be nice, too.
My goal in this post and in this blog (as it relates to game design) is to figure out how to entertain players.

So back to the topic: I think minigames are 'cheating'. It's easy enough to 'design' a minigame because they are, generally, just executions of known designs. There's some GBA title that I remember being mentioned on Penny-Arcade that's like a billion different 15-second minigames so obviously there's room to stretch. (I feel like I should go look that game up.) Part of the power of the minigame comes from a player's experience with the genre of minigame, however. The power of a minipuzzle by contrast is that it forces the player to make a decision about how he is going to play the game proper.

Take track layout in Transport Tycoon. Building a cheap but speedy rail line around a mountain is no easy task. Yet how that player builds the line affects how his game develops -- if there's enough of a detour to go grab another town easily, if his line will be easy to upgrade, if he needs to buy different engines just to handle this one tricky stretch, etc. And basic stuff like how much he spent on it, and how efficiently the mountain line gets goods to and from each side of the hill.

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Now, do I have a conclusion? Hmm. The lesson, if any, is "add minipuzzles." The tricky part is how. Sounds like a good future topic, eh? Part II in this series explores several good minipuzzles and examines what makes for a good minipuzzle. Part III, not yet written, will look at ways to add and improve minipuzzles.