Fed II Star - May 7, 2006 - Official News 7

HOW OBJECTS WORK - THE OBJECT NAME GUESSING GAME

In classic Fed, a common feature of any puzzle was to try and figure out what the name of an object was. Objects in the old version of the game had a short description, which was displayed when you walked into the room, and which didn't necessarily have to include the actual name of the object.

I don't know about you, but I found it intensely frustrating to be standing in a room trying to pick something up, but not being able to figure out exactly what the damn thing was. It did not make a satisfactory puzzle, but rather an artificial road-block in my way. I knew exactly what I wanted to do - pick up the object - but the game wouldn't let me if I didn't type it using exactly the right wording. This kind of fight-the-syntax doesn't make for a good puzzle.

I have to confess to being guilty of doing this myself. On my planet Cabbage, I had an object with the short description:

Something is lying here... grey, squidgy, organic and disgusting grey matter.

The name of the object was "brain" and actually I didn't think it would be too hard to guess, but it seemed to stump a lot of people.

The reason I and other puzzle designers relied on this method so much in classic Fed was because there were not very many other things you could do, the event system was so limited.

But in Fed II, things are very different. We've got an extensive event system that lets you do all kinds of wonderful things, both with objects and without. So when designing a puzzle, it's possible to make the hard bits things that are genuinely puzzling, and not just guess-the-object-name.

In fact, when I am programming stuff for Fed II - whether it's for a player planet or on the Sol planets - I go further than that, and where possible I provide synonyms and alternative versions of objects and commands so that players don't have to struggle to find the right wording. For example, if you explore the wilderness on Earth, you will find some bushes:

The brambles are covered with ripe blackberries - most of the ones within reach have been eaten, but there's a small cluster you can just about get to.

There is an object here, which has commands attached to it, so you can eat some of the delicious fruit. The object is invisible so it doesn't show up separately when you walk into the location. Therefore you have to guess what the object name is, and what the commands are. Not a hard thing to do because I have made it very simple: you can use "blackberry" or "blackberries" and you can "get", "take", "pick" or "eat" them.

If you are designing a puzzle and want to request some custom objects, please bear all this in mind when deciding how to use the objects and the commands on them. Don't make players guess the command!

The next article about custom objects will give you some ideas how you can use objects in your puzzles.