I started to pick up a somewhat dormant side project again.
It has the working title of the "Wise Weasel". This is supposed to be a minimum spoiler hint system for adventure games. I really don't like walk throughs telling you to "Walk into the Armor Shop. Pick up mirror, arrows and use cheese on hole to pick up mouse", because that breaks all immersion and puzzle mindset. A hint system is more like "You can burn rope if you focus light a bit", followed e.g. by "But now the beam of light is on the floor, not on the rope. How do we reflect light around" to nudge the player a bit into a direction of looking for a mirror or something shiny. Or to polish something? This keeps one in the mindset of an adventure and a puzzle game, opposed to some IKEA instructions.
NiceGameHints[1] is already nice at this, but I find that the chapter / puzzle list still gives off to much information and spoils too much plot. I'm much rather tinkering with giving the user some word cloud of both words describing the puzzles as well as generic words on top, so they have to select two words what they are stuck with. For example, you'd select "Witch + House" or "Witch + angry" and this would reveal a puzzle "The angry witch doesn't talk to me and turns me to stone if I enter her house". I'm just worried that this might be more moon logic than the game itself.
It's mostly a bit difficult to keep all of this state (unlocked chapters, known puzzles, ...) in track with URLs or cookies or something, because I don't really want to run a database... and requiring user accounts is just a lot of work. And I'd prefer to keep this mostly without JS as a classical system just rendering HTML. If you have some food for thought there, I'm happy for input. Currently it's just list in URL parameters.
It has the working title of the "Wise Weasel". This is supposed to be a minimum spoiler hint system for adventure games. I really don't like walk throughs telling you to "Walk into the Armor Shop. Pick up mirror, arrows and use cheese on hole to pick up mouse", because that breaks all immersion and puzzle mindset. A hint system is more like "You can burn rope if you focus light a bit", followed e.g. by "But now the beam of light is on the floor, not on the rope. How do we reflect light around" to nudge the player a bit into a direction of looking for a mirror or something shiny. Or to polish something? This keeps one in the mindset of an adventure and a puzzle game, opposed to some IKEA instructions.
NiceGameHints[1] is already nice at this, but I find that the chapter / puzzle list still gives off to much information and spoils too much plot. I'm much rather tinkering with giving the user some word cloud of both words describing the puzzles as well as generic words on top, so they have to select two words what they are stuck with. For example, you'd select "Witch + House" or "Witch + angry" and this would reveal a puzzle "The angry witch doesn't talk to me and turns me to stone if I enter her house". I'm just worried that this might be more moon logic than the game itself.
It's mostly a bit difficult to keep all of this state (unlocked chapters, known puzzles, ...) in track with URLs or cookies or something, because I don't really want to run a database... and requiring user accounts is just a lot of work. And I'd prefer to keep this mostly without JS as a classical system just rendering HTML. If you have some food for thought there, I'm happy for input. Currently it's just list in URL parameters.
1: https://www.nicegamehints.com - for example https://www.nicegamehints.com/guide/legend-of-skye/part-2/bo....