Discovering these game-specific quirks is a real part of the player experience which I feel many designers don’t acknowledge or account for but which is critically important.ĭay of the Tentacle does seem to take this opportunity to get the player acclimated to the type of game they are playing. Knowing what kind of game is being played factors into how the game is played. Some have realtime action sequences ( Space Quest) while many don’t. Some games require constant saves to protect against dead-ends ( Zork Zero). Some games reward exploration ( The Secret of Monkey Island), while other games punish even the slightest risky move ( Adventure). Some games allow your character to die ( Beneath a Steel Sky, Kings Quest), while others don’t ( Day Of The Tentacle). But outside of genre conventions (and outside of the stories themselves) each individual adventure game has a very specific set of characteristics which inform the style of play. Adventure games as a whole subscribe to a lot of similar conventions: focus on story, puzzle solving, inventory management, etc.
This is the “What kind of game is this?” puzzle (for lack of a better name). The Meta-GameĪt the beginning of the game the player is also engaging in a kind of meta-puzzle which goes on when playing any adventure game for the first time. While providing back-story and plot these early puzzles also have the side effect of handing the player some early successes to boost their confidence. These puzzles reveal critical story elements which almost all other puzzles rely on. While the player is not required to complete them all before moving on (see Highlight below) they are heavily encouraged to do so. The linear introductory segment of the game has four puzzles if you include the not-really-a-puzzle of Boot Up the Game. You could certainly make an argument for including it in which case it would have an edge directly from the ‘Begin Game’ node. I didn’t include it as a puzzle in my graph because it has no dependencies other than starting the game. Like realizing you can shut the door to the Sleeping Conventioneer’s room and get the keys out of it. That does not include a few things which are not technically puzzles according to my definition but which will still feel like a puzzle to the player. The Puzzlesīy my count there are 63 puzzles in Day of the Tentacle. My desire is to create a resource game developers seeking to learn from the game or just for fans who want to delve deeply into a classic game to see what makes it tick. I will attempt to determine the quality of each puzzle (via a standard set of criteria) and see what part it plays in the game as a whole.
This is an attempt to analyze the game as a creative work in the way a film or novel might be. There are plenty of those available (an excellent one is here). This final post is a puzzle by puzzle wrap-up in which we’ll take a critical look at the game and apply some of Ron Gilbert’s rules for game design along the way. By this point you have hopefully read the introduction to Puzzle Dependency Graphs and seen them used in Part two to breakdown the framework of the game.
THE SECRET OF MONKEY ISLAND SAFE COMBINATION SERIES
Welcome to the third and final part of this series on The Day of the Tentacle. Currently 18 of 63 puzzles have been broken down. This post is an in-depth analysis of each puzzle in the game. This is part three of a three part series analyzing The Day of the Tentacle:
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