Random puzzle spawns?

I haven't seen much of this where it's really needed: in games where the mechanics are repetitive (nearly all RTS, TBS, racing, fighting, sims, etc). Mixing in occasional unexpectedness is a great way to keep the flow of the game interesting, and I think all games that employ any type of repetitive mechanics would benefit from it.

I personally like emergent problems. For a simple example, Tetris. The block shapes are never exactly what you need. You fill the empty shape with half of it as a solution, then the other half adds to a future problem. Enough solutions, and you have a new dilemma to solve. One that is a direct result of your actions, but still partially unpredictable as it forms.

But then, it's not easy to take a simple mechanic that works in a game like Tetris and make it more worldly, while keeping it fun, rather than annoying.

I've seen a few games with randomly generated adventure style puzzles, like in Lucasarts old Desktop Adventures series. You'd need to find item A to unlock gate B and get item C, to then give to person D to unlock gate E and so on. That's not too hard to generate, but it's hard to add some personality to how the puzzles are handled rather than people who say things like "fetch me item C".

I can't think of any randomly generated puzzles but I've played a few adventure games like quest for glory and blade runner that had puzzle variants. The game assigned different possible puzzles in each play through thus changing the experience depending the puzzles that appeared and they path you took.

A good example of game where this could work would be a computerised version of Clue, where the player is a detective. Each game you have a different murderer, room, and weapon. The game would select a combination of clues to place in the game world depending on those 3 variables. The player then has to piece the clues together and discover the murderer, room, and weapon.

In more of a sim game scenario I would have found it interesting if a game like princess maker 2 had selection of main plots, and side stories. Where each play through assigned one of selection of main plots and each year there was a change a random side story would occur.

If the game itself doesn't have any irreversiable plot at stake, there is probably no problem having events spawned randomly. I am assuming that in the situation of Sims, given enough time, the player could always recover to a previous state even if the random event proves to be disasterous. I think in general game design, the randomly generated puzzles would have to be guaranteed solvable or not have too big an effect. To guarantee that a puzzle is solvable could be hard depended on the puzzle.


In my own design I favor a mix of emergent puzzles, random puzzles, and foreseeable puzzles. The reason is that in my design the player could be unrecoverably defeated. In the way they are used, I don't need to guarantee that a puzzle could be solved.


Emergent Puzzle
An example of emergent puzzle is that healing a character. Suppose the action to heal the character requires a doctor with a medical kit at the patient, depending on where everything is, a puzzle could arise. For instance, the patient could be at a location that the doctor could not get to, then perhaps a different character would need to bring the patient back. Sometimes the player could get into a situation where there is no way to heal an injured character. This puzzle is emergent because the game only specified that a character could get hurt if the player is not careful; the part of the stage is differential and dynamically accessible by the characters (e.g. when the player moved some blocks and blocked the entrance herself). In this case, the code never scripted an event where the doctor and the character are separated arbitrarily and the character is to be injured to create a puzzle.


Player Sought Random Puzzle
An example of a player sought event is an exploration coupled with puzzles. When the player is ready to explore, he moves to a new location, puzzles would arise. In that case, I would have more liberty to spawn more variety of puzzles because I know that the player is out "looking for trouble". These puzzles must be solvable, in general. If the player sees that the puzzle cannot be solved with what they had, they could return with more resource.


Foreseeable and Avoidable Random Puzzle
If the player is not exploring but staying in the same place, than I would just let puzzles arise from the player's choice of action, or spawn puzzles, but give the player the forecast. In this case I don't want to just randomly spawn potentially unsolvable puzzle to screw up the player. For example, if escaping bad weather is a puzzle, I would let the player see the weather forecast of the surrounding. If the player is destroy by bad weather, the player can only blame themselves for not seeing it coming earlier. (This way, when I spawn the puzzles, I don't need to guarantee that each puzzle has a solution. I leave it to the player to decide whether a puzzle could be solved or it should be avoided.)

Wai - Actually one of the little details I didn't like about Sims2 was that certain disasters were fatal - you couldn't really recover from that unless you wanted to create a new clone of that sim and start raising them and developing their relationships from scratch.

I was mainly thinking of puzzles where success at the puzzle gives a loot item and/or money, maybe equipment, the same way fighting a monster does in a typical RPG. Being unable to solve the puzzle or get a high score on a minigame-type puzzle would not affect the game's plot, it would just result in getting no loot or low quality loot.

Another possibility is random spawns of 'tokens', a consumable item that can be traded or used at the player's leisure to play a prize-awarding minigame, which you could not play (or could only practice, not play for prizes) if you did not have a token for that minigame.

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Original post by sunandshadow I was mainly thinking of puzzles where success at the puzzle gives a loot item and/or money, maybe equipment, the same way fighting a monster does in a typical RPG. Being unable to solve the puzzle or get a high score on a minigame-type puzzle would not affect the game's plot, it would just result in getting no loot or low quality loot.

Would you consider the career events that you get in Sims 2 where you have to make a critical choice that will either negatively or positively affect your job to be what you're looking for? If so, in the Beyond the Sword expansion of Civilization IV they've introduced something similar but more diverse. You'll have a pop up as a result of a random event, and you can choose to spend resources addressing it or you can ignore it. Examples will be a great diplomat offering to negotiate accords or whether or not you choose to replant a forest that bandits burned down. Galactic Civilizations has something similar, but you get to make moral choices in response to the events.

Although I'd have preferred you couldn't die, I liked the Sims 2 situations as well. What I was impressed by was how wide a variety of encounter you could get from such simple "puzzle pieces." Being able to get a bizarre disease from a pet hamster or not being able to clean the cat box because you're pregnant was such a weird, left field kind of problem not often seen in a game! With such an open subject as life sim, you never know what's next.

Space Colony and Startopia both have these sort of situations, by the way. In the former, which was very Sims like, you could have personnel go bonkers or creatures invade, both of which would trash facilities but in VERY specific ways (only food, or the oxygen plant, etc.); this forced you to first get them in hand, then bounce back from a strategically changed situation.

Startopia had much the same dynamic but they were a bit more creative about it. You might accept sick travellers only to have them turn into mutant monsters if you didn't treat them fast enough; or they might simply die, which automatically charged you money.

I'm curious about one thing, though. If you have more frequently occurring disasters, how do you get the player to see them as fun things to deal with rather than annoying problems? If the fridge breaks, the tap leaks and the toaster burns your character's breakfast all while you're trying to get out the door so you won't lose your job, isn't your natural instinct going to be to find a way to stop these situations from happening? Don't you automatically think, "buy a better fridge/tap/toaster" so that you can concentrate on what it is you're trying to do (romance/career build/etc.)?

I had thought about what a game heavy with situations might be like but concluded that unless they're sold to the player as expected challenges (like a dungeon full of monsters) players may simply see them as impediments.

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Original post by Wavinator [C]areer events that you get in Sims 2 where you have to make a critical choice that will either negatively or positively affect your job...

are things I'd say are an example of what to avoid in puzzles. The situations presented are humorous enough, and the ability to influence the Sim's job in such a way was a good idea, but there was no ground to choose a response. The correct answer was, if I recall correctly, in no way guaranteed to be the more sensible option. As a result, the player would have to just guess, having a 50/50 shot at being right. It may initially seem like the player has actual influence over the career, but over time it becomes clear that the events might as well be random.

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Original post by ash32 The situations presented are humorous enough, and the ability to influence the Sim's job in such a way was a good idea, but there was no ground to choose a response. The correct answer was, if I recall correctly, in no way guaranteed to be the more sensible option. As a result, the player would have to just guess, having a 50/50 shot at being right.

In general I agree with you, but I'm a bit divided about this in terms of why it was implemented in the Sims. The career ladder thing had the same problem as unlimited growth in other games. If things go too smoothly, they're not very interesting. Just like the shower leaking or bugs invading, the situations interrupted what would otherwise be a straight, linear progression up the career ladder.

I would be curious to know what it would be like to always be able to get the right answer. If you could I don't think you'd be able to reuse the situations because you'd know what the right answer was. For me at least part of the challenge came from the fact that the right answer was sometimes so illogical that I didn't remember it.

Have you played puzzle quest?

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Original post by Wavinator In general I agree with you, but I'm a bit divided about this in terms of why it was implemented in the Sims. The career ladder thing had the same problem as unlimited growth in other games. If things go too smoothly, they're not very interesting. Just like the shower leaking or bugs invading, the situations interrupted what would otherwise be a straight, linear progression up the career ladder. I would be curious to know what it would be like to always be able to get the right answer. If you could I don't think you'd be able to reuse the situations because you'd know what the right answer was. For me at least part of the challenge came from the fact that the right answer was sometimes so illogical that I didn't remember it.

I understand why it was implemented, it's just the method that I question. There was no functional difference between having a choice and having the event be random, except that if you play the game long enough then you will eventually know all the right answers, which wouldn't be fun anyway.