Hi All,

In a similar vein to the GameGuru Classic RPGs thread, can we also highlight and pinpoint great first-person 'Puzzle' games created in GameGuru Classic, and discuss the quintessential ingredients that differentiate a puzzle game from a regular shooter or RPG game. The RPG thread has been a valuable resource, and it would be good to give Puzzlers the same treatment!

This publication is not large enough but my worth a try : Design_and_development_a_first-person_puzzle_game_based_on_time-travel_game_mechanics

I love the puzzle game where the best gun you have, is your brain.
Aquarelle world might be considered a puzzle game since the player has to solve them, in order to gain bonuses, if you really provide the necessary tools for this type of game, I would re-take the game development, but this time I would start from scratch.
Some of the puzzles I use on Aquarelle world game.

I like this idea Lee. Great to see you asking. Probably having features
(which have already been mentioned!) would help in any puzzle type
game-- those quintessential ingredients being spawning entities @ script
level and pointing to/ selecting map objects with the mouse.
Most puzzle styles would be menu heavy, and probably inventory menu
at that. And of course stem from good ol creative thinkers with unique
imaginations.
Will mull over any more ideas, but I think accessing a broader puzzle fan
base population might bring in more ideas that pop. ~ Google...

The modern horror "walking simulator" games are puzzle games.
I just played the new Amnesia game and it had some fantastic puzzles. I imagine creating the puzzles would be really limited to the imagination of the developer. But besides the aspect of solving puzzles and story-telling these games typically but not always rely on some sort of inventory management, like limited space / combining multiple items. Great visuals, exploration, sneaking around, and in horror games a lot have some sort of "sanity" meter.

Most of the horror ones I've played like Layers of Fear, all have a ton of psychedelic effects going on. And probably a way to change up shaders on the fly. I think the lighting and visuals is mega important in a game like this as you can't expect the player to go from one puzzle to the next for 5 hours. So it seems to me like the mega cool visuals / trippy effects and shaders is a kind of a payoff for the player. As the game gets deeper, reality begins to break down and the game world can shift in an instant, to a new world with completely new physical laws. Thus the developer can use the new laws to make new interesting puzzles so gameplay doesn't get stale.

Sometimes there are enemies in puzzle, walking sim games. If it is a standard monster type enemy, and it doesn't have amazing AI, the immersion will be broke instantly and will ruin that part of the game, if not the whole game. I just played a puzzle game called Lust from Beyond: Scarlet. The game was going pretty smooth I was enjoying it, then I did a ritual and was teleported to some Lovecraftian dimension and there was some enemies I had to get past. The AI was really bad, the animations were not perfect and because I'm already in "solve puzzle" mode little details about the enemies just jump out at me. It really just brought me back to reality and ruined the whole game for me. Anytime I saw an enemy from there on out, I knew exactly what to do to cheese it. It is almost 2021 and even things like >running from an enemy, >hide in closet >enemy comes into room looks around and then leaves, >player safe or >monster opens closet door and kills you. Which I'd say for GG Classic having that whole scene play out would be quite the feat - but even that probably will not cut it because it isn't good enough anymore. And I'm not saying this is something that should even be included with GGMax but the cellar demo stuff makes me think horror vibe, so I don't know if that is the route you really want to go.
The better horror ones I've played have some sort of mechanic to help hide the enemy AI. So that the player will never be in a situation where you can study the monster. Like a sanity meter where looking at a monster or staying in the dark for to long triggers screen effects and distortions and it effects get worse as the sanity meter builds up. So you even if you wanted to scope out the monster and learn its patrol route you won't be able too because you physically cant see the monster because looking at the monster raises your sanity meter thus distorting your screen. Even this design mechanic is quite dated now and I know a lot of people do not like it. In 2010 it was pretty cool but now I think players find it more annoying than anything. But it does add an element to puzzle games, like a meta puzzle, if you don't keep your sanity meter low then it may make solving the puzzle at hand more difficult.

I hate to say this but i think it needs to be said. There actually are not many decent completed "games" in general made with Game Guru. So if we are to look for the best of the best... we are really looking at a very limited number of games and very few of them are even worth mentioning or playing.

When it comes to genres other than FPS, you'll see an even more limited selection of projects. Most of them are canceled projects or on-going projects that are consistently navigating the short-comings of the engine. Generally they don't see the light of day, or end up just fading away deep in the WIP's of the forums never to be seen again.

An Example Here:
https://forum.game-guru.com/thread
https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/211540

My GG Puzzle Nominations:

Avenging Eagle's Ignite
Synchromesh's Protascope

They are both however WIPs as far as I know.

Thanks for the nomination, T! Here's a video that neatly sums up my journey to make Ignite more puzzle-focused.



Out of the box, Game Guru is only capable of a few basic non-violent mechanics like key-finding, switches, and a bit of light platforming. I appreciate almost anything is possible in LUA, but many of us users are first-time developers or not script-minded, so the onus should be on TGC to provide a few more mechanics out of the box we can customise in-editor (rather than in Notepad++).

Adding readable notes, combination locks, and collectable scrolls required an extensive amount of scripting from AmenMoses, and they're not exactly user-friendly scripts that could be sold on the store to others. The readable notes suffer from the same limitations on text control as mentioned in the RPG thread; each line must be carefully laid out by hand and spaced independently of the next line. A change of wording to one sentence is frequently and change of the entire note as each like has to edited to contain the right number of words to fit on the screen.



One of the never-released levels of Extraction Point had a puzzle where you had to find three cans of fuel in order to run a generator. This script came from the community, but it would be cool to have it come from TGC and officially support dynamic LUA. That way, I could say "actually, instead of cans of fuel, I want the player to pick-up 4 x wheels, each one will be called "wheel" instead of "fuel"".

It would be cool to have more physics-based puzzle mechanics. You'll already be aware of, synchromesh's Protascope, which uses Portal-esque weighted cubes and buttons to open doors. But, thinking of some other Valve games, it would be nice to see the ability to do stuff like this:



I can't find the video anymore, but I believe the old FPS Creator model pack 54 gave us more gameplay elements to play with. Still relatively simple stuff like "enter this four digit code here" or "press the right combination of coloured buttons" but it was a nice addition nonetheless. More stuff like that, available out of the box but fully configurable in-editor, would be great.

AE

If you want a game to use as a guide that has all the elements of classic puzzling then it has to be Avenging Eagle's Ignite
Its all there, all the ingredients you would need, Even his video above almost answers your questions of a perfect puzzler.

Avenging Eagle, great post. GG seems pretty great at making the fp adventure type games, like ignite.

AE's screenshot of NotePad++ showing the amount of command calls we have to make to put together a single paragraph really exemplifies how much we need line-break support and text-wrap support. I've been asking for this for years.

Thank you but that's not the takeaway I was going for. The point is, Game Guru is not great at making games like this, it took a lot of hard work by someone much smarter than me to figure out these most basic of mechanics, more hard than it should have.



Tell me about it! On the subject of text boxes, can I just say that I think the spritesheet-based fonts of Game Guru Classic are antiquated and extremely limited, if for no other reason than: resolution. I need to ensure text displays at a consistent size regardless of screen resolution, but using the current Game Guru system means a character in font size 3, for example, will always be 36 pixels high. But there's a huge difference between how that looks in 4K as opposed to 1080, simply because 36 pixels is such a smaller proportion of overall screen resolution at 4K. It means that what is readable on a 1080 monitor is damn near squint-inducing on a 4K one. Only AmenMoses' sprite-based text library attempts to resolve this, but it's a nightmare to make characters for (and each must be made individually) and the weird/awful sub-pixel sampling of sprites in GGC (as documented here: https://forum.game-guru.com/thread/221458) renders each character an illegible mess. Hopefully this is not such an issue in Max because of Wicked handling the rendering?

AE

I asked Lee once in Discord about a sort of Rich-Text equivalent for Max, he mentioned it was something they'd be looking into; For further text support like fonts, colors, styles etc. It be amazing if we had something similar for Classic.

Ive recently gravitated a lot towards AGK after realizing how much support there is for everything related to text. Its truly amazing and as great as GG is at 3D world building when it comes to the interface and storytelling, it lacks this support. At the very least its a bit of a step up from the early days of FPSCx9 when we were forced to make an entire paragraphs in Photoshop and save them out as a PNG to be displayed on the screen.

Text, as the TGC team implemented it, is clearly very unpolished and not good enough for game making. We always need to revamp things like this, similar to other comparable engines like RPG Maker. But the real problem is how absent decent ways of putting text onscreen are, and how it feels TGC doesn't want us to put text in the game - judging by how absent text tools are.

If GG Max is a decent tool due to the UI this time around, then putting text in our game should also have a nice intuitive interface.


Interesting thread. Hadn't thought of how important text is to people making games with GG.