[rtrooney]

Originally Posted by Lee in Limbo

I don't remember any such dead end in Shivers.[/B]

As I said in a prior message, you can play a game that has dead ends without activating them, and you obviously didn't activate this one.

If, by chance you have half a wood chalice in your possession, and enter the room next to the horse puzzle, if you exit and the wood Ixupi is in the woodpile opposite the door, you can't move forward. You are at a dead end.

Now what is the chance of having this occur? Probably slim. But it is a dead end, because it can happen.

[Len Green]

Undetected dead ends occur pretty obviously when one (or more) “unique” player tackles the game in a different or ‘unconventional’ way or in a different order from the ‘obvious’. Otherwise the dead end remains “dormant”.

Every player without exception is ‘entitled’ to play any game in whatever order or method s(he) chooses… provided of course that it’s ‘legitimate’. There are an infinite number of keystrokes which can be made in any game and if any single one produces a dead end then the game programming is faulty.

It is often extremely difficult (or nearly impossible) to eliminate every dead end. The Developer(s) and most of the (very good) beta testers are always likely to follow the “logical” path … but it’s the highly “illogical” BUT PERMISSABLE path which may produce the dead end for 1 player in a hundred (or more). And there is absolutely no question that this is an extremely bad flaw!

VERY recent example :- Al Emmo underwent 3 waves of very extensive beta testing by a large number of experienced beta testers for about 3 months.
The third and last wave of 6 testers (including myself) alone went through 6 builds, each time playing from the beginning to the end since ALL previous build saves were useless.

None of us (including myself) detected a dead end in the second half of the game.
Just about 10 days before going gold, a German beta-tester discovered a dead end. It was generated by a legitimate action which no “normal” person was likely to perform … but he did… and had every right to !!

Once it was discovered and reported, it took the Developers no more than 2 minutes to obviate.

This is typical.

[Lee in Limbo]

Originally Posted by rtrooney

If, by chance you have half a wood chalice in your possession, and enter the room next to the horse puzzle, if you exit and the wood Ixupi is in the woodpile opposite the door, you can't move forward. You are at a dead end.

I honestly can't recall if my friends or I stumbled across that one back in the 90s when we took turns with it. It sounds to me like you found a genuine bug in the coding, which to me screams 'not enough beta'.

Still, I guess you'd have to know it was there before you could fix it. Funny how that works in such things. It doesn't occur to you that it's there until someone more inquisitive or random than you discovers a coding flaw and loses hours of play in the process. Depressing.

[Scoville]

Why not put a puzzle in the room in which you are trapped that allows you to open the mechanical door? For example, the player could hotwire the door by opening some wall panels, cutting wires inside them, and connecting one from a portion of the house which is powered to one for the door. This way, if the player already picked up the fuse they are rewarded by not having to solve this puzzle and if they did not they would not be stuck.

I don't like the idea of not having the door lock until you have acquired the fuses. As was already pointed out, this changes the obstacle from being believeable to being forced. Furthermore, it defies solid puzzle logic. The player would have no reason to pick up the fuses in the first place other than years of adventure games conditioning him to pick up everything.

That sort of puzzle design is useless because it does not cause the player to think. It is like giving someone a key and then showing him a locked door. Their likely reaction is "A locked door. Maybe I'll try this key." It's obvious and pointless.

It's better to create a situation in which you show the player a locked door and he has to search for the key. In this case they would probably have a reaction closer to "A locked door. How can I get out of this situation?" This leads to creative and analytical thought rather than simply going through the motions of trying out the key they already had.

[tsa]

Originally Posted by fov

Yes. Just make it so the fuse only blows if the player HAS picked up the key.

Why not have another fuse blow waaaaay in the beginning of the game so the player has to pick up a box of fuses that he/she carries aroud with him/her everywhere afterwards?

[Skye]

Thanks for all your input. It is much appreciated.

The dead end scenario has been corrected but there was some discussion between my partner and I as to how exactly correct the problem without 'spoon feeding' the player.

I feel that I have been able to rectify this problem and still maintain the random nature of the game and its puzzles. I guess only time will tell . . .

[rtrooney]

Originally Posted by Lee in Limbo

It sounds to me like you found a genuine bug in the coding, which to me screams 'not enough beta'.

I was a big fan of Shivers1. It remains one of my top ten favorite games. Because of my promotion of it on the old CompuServe GAMERS forum, Willie Eide invited me to beta Shivers2, which I declined. All of which is neither here nor there.

Re: the dead end "bug" in Shivers1, I can say that I probably played that game at least six times, and only encountered the dead end once. It requires three events. One, you must have half of a wood pot in your possesion; two, you must be at that location with the pot; and three, whatever random generator that decides where and when the wood Ixupi will locate itself decides that this is a good time to locate it in the scrap lumber pile. You are figuratively and literally at a dead end for, as you recall, that location is at a dead end of a hallway. There's no way to exit except via the way you came in, and repeatedly entering/exiting the room behind you did not cause the Ixupi to relocate. Ergo.....trapped.

As Len Green commented, I had every right to be at this location with this piece of inventory, so the problem was in the coding that allowed the Ixupi to be in that same location under those circumstances. If I had been carrying a different pot part, it wouldn't have been a dead end.

I should modify my statement that this was the only dead end I ever experienced. There was another in Beyond Atlantis which was even more infuriating. But this was due to a known video card incompatability issue. At a certain, and repeatable point in the game, the game would crash. The publisher/developer either couldn't or wouldn't issue a patch. At least with Shivers1, I could finish the game. In this case, finishing was impossible. Money down the drain.

[Lee in Limbo]

I found Beyond Atlantis entirely frustrating for quite different reasons, but I'm not surprised you had hardware incompatibility problems. Very sad to hear they never patched it for you.

And Shivers is one of my top ten, too. I remember that scrap pile and the door behind you (lead into that storage room with the fortune teller, right?). I think I only ever found the Ixupi in that pile once in three or four plays. I used to be paranoid about running around with any jar for too long without the right lid, so I tended to shuffle everything closer to one another as soon as I located things. Lots of note taking, which I don't really like to do for modern games, but sometimes, just sometimes, I miss it. These days, games that need note taking usually turn out to be unfathomable even witht he notes (Schizm comes to mind).

[Captain Hero]

Originally Posted by Len Green

words

So, how do you feel about the HHGG text adventure? That has huge dead ends. They are relevant to the game, though.

I think dead ends can be hugely frustrating, but they aren't necessarily bad. The OP indicates that the reason the player would be in a dead end situation is from being a moron, if I read it right. One of the key tenets of adventure games is pick every single thing up. If the player ignores this and gets stuck as a result, I don't think that is shoddy programming, I think it is just a bad player. I do think the puzzle should let you know it is a dead end by killing you off, though. Deaths in video games are not fun, but if it is a situation where you go in the room, door closes, and you get a message saying "you died, blah blah blah, maybe you should make sure you have a key next time...would you like to try again?" And then it shifts you back one move...that would be fine.

[stepurhan]

Originally Posted by Captain Hero

I think dead ends can be hugely frustrating, but they aren't necessarily bad. The OP indicates that the reason the player would be in a dead end situation is from being a moron, if I read it right..

The original premise as stated was that the key was in a drawer.

What if you didn't see the drawer? It's easy to miss hotspots sometimes. What if there were other things in the drawer that partially hid the key? It's not uncommon for key (if you'll pardon the pun) items to be obscured. What if it was possible to walk through the slamming door without even entering the room with the drawer and key in it? Is it fair to call someone that just happens to choose the wrong direction to walk in a moron?

The problem with the original scenario (which I understand has now been rectified) is that the dead end arose without warning. The person that opens the hold door at the start of Prisoner of Ice knowing a hideous monster is loose inside is a moron (or, as in my case, has just made a save game and is curious. To save you time, the monster steps through the door and kills you) A person just stepping through a door is not.

[rtrooney]

Originally Posted by Captain Hero

"you died, blah blah blah, maybe you should make sure you have a key next time...would you like to try again?" And then it shifts you back one move...that would be fine.

Unfortunately that was not the definition of the dead end posited by the game developer. In fact, the scenario you describe is anything but a dead end inasmuch as the programmers had the foresight to see you might do this, and thus gave you a second chance.

A dead end is a dead end, i.e., no alternative but to quit the game and start over from the last save. And that, I think most have agreed is faulty programming.

[Lee in Limbo]

Originally Posted by Captain Hero

One of the key tenets of adventure games is pick every single thing up. If the player ignores this and gets stuck as a result, I don't think that is shoddy programming, I think it is just a bad player.

And that there underscores the biggest problem with AG design: complacency with a known inconsistency. If the immersion in a game is broken by the necessity of behaving in an unconvention (for mainstream people; adventure gamers march to a different drum, thanks to precedence) manner to achieve resolution, then the game has not been designed properly.

Understand, it's not 'real world' logic that dictates that you pick up everything not nailed down, whether you realize it or not. Pockets in the real world are only so big. We'd need to be wearing some military-standard cargo pants with half adozen pockets and a knapsack to carry all of the things we run across in the average inventory-intensive AG. This is a known peculiarity of AGs, and confounds most folks who haven't run across it a half dozen times or more.

Just because it's an accepted convention of the games, and all experienced AGers 'know' the unspoken rules ('Inspect everything; take everything not nailed down') does not make it acceptable design philosophy. It's the sort of thinking that makes AGs the marginalized genre it has become.

In common parlayance, we've crawled up our own asses and disappeared.

Until such thinking is eliminated from adventure game design, AGs will always be treated as a marginal niche market with fewer new players every year. Whereas, if you just put something into the game that introduces the idea that 'you may need this item later; pick it up', you have a feature that does not defy common logic.

Immersion absolutely requires that every choice you make be internally consistent with the narrative and the nature of the environment. As soon as you start making decisions based on genre conventions, you are breaking down the fourth wall. The self-consciousness destroys the imemrsion, and only a veteran gamer who has had to accept these lines of 'game logic' can proceed without losing their place.

Ultimately, it's up to the game developer to decide if they're making a game for new gamers as well as old, but the key is to remember that new gamers have not played Monkey Island, and are not steeped in the luddicrous pseudo-logic of the adventure gaming universe. As well, the laws as such are bogus, and should never have come into common practice. It's laziness on the part of game devs that has allowed this attitude to become so prevalent. The best games I've played deliberately prevent this sort of gaming logic to be necessary. It's something more game devs need to come to grips with.