The Challenge of "Challenge"

Hi there blog readers,

All of us here at Legacy want to thank everyone who has given us such positive feedback on our Lost Cases of Sherlock Holmes game. Of course nice feedback is gratifying to receive after a game has been released, getting feedback from play testers during the beta phase of the game was a significant contributing factor in the game’s success. Play tester feedback allowed us to make modifications to some features and "fine tune" certain aspects of the game, including the level of challenge in some areas.

"Challenge" is a key component to every game. Without it, players are not motivated to engage in the game, since some level of challenge is needed for a game to be considered "fun." Imagine a game where you were guaranteed to win every single time, even if the choices you made were always purely random. Doesn’t sound like much fun, does it? On the other end of the spectrum, imagine a game where there was no possible way to win, no matter what you did. Most people wouldn’t consider that much fun either. Now imagine a game in which you find that you can win most of the time when you give a good effort, but sometimes lose when you don’t do your best. That’s the "zone of optimal challenge" that every game designer tries to achieve.

In our Sherlock Holmes game, we received feedback from some play testers during the beta phase who pointed out particular items in some scenes which players found too difficult to locate. Usually it involved items that were made too small or obstructed too much by other objects. We were able to address those issues usually by adjusting the graphics and moving the small items to be positioned more prominently in the foreground, and less covered by other things. If you have played many hidden object games before, I’m sure you have encountered trying to find hard-to-locate items that, even after receiving a hint, you still didn’t recognize that thing as the item you were looking for. That’s really frustrating as a player, since the game seems unfairly difficult at that point.

Another area where we were able to address the issue of challenge in our Sherlock game was in some of the puzzles. In the second case, you may recall that you encounter a locked box in Orsino’s carnival wagon. In the version the beta testers played, you needed to solve a slider puzzle to open the box. In case you’re not familiar with them, a slider puzzle is typically a grid of square tiles (each with a portion of the larger picture) that must be rearranged by sliding the tiles into the open square. We received a lot of negative feedback on that puzzle, where many players felt it was too hard to arrange the tiles into the correct configuration, and simply gave up on the game at that point. The feedback was loud and clear. So, in the final version of the game, we modified that puzzle to be one in which each tile just needed to be rotated in place in order to complete the picture. That change made the puzzle difficulty at a more reasonable challenge level (and hopefully averted the curse that one of the testers threatened to cast upon us if we if we kept the slider puzzle in the game).

Another example of us modifying a puzzle’s challenge level was the cat collar puzzle in the first case in the game. In that puzzle, you encounter a cat collar with gems that must be placed back in the collar based on the gem shapes. Since the six gems to replace were all simple shapes, completing the puzzle was very easy and usually took just a few seconds. We thought that was OK since we wanted everyone to succeed at the first puzzle in the game. Interestingly, we received feedback that people thought it was "kindergarten easy" and were assuming the whole game was filled with ridiculously easy puzzles which were not challenging enough. In response to that feedback, we decided to break the gems up into two or three pieces each, meaning that there were many more smaller gem pieces to put back on the collar, making it harder to identify their correct positions.

Those are just a few of the examples of how we did our best to listen to play tester feedback to adjust the level of challenge. Finding that optimal level is certainly not an exact science, as what is too difficult for some people, may be perfectly acceptable for some users, and may even be too easy for others. In a perfect scenario, you’d want to continue the cycle of testing, receiving feedback and making adjustments as often as possible. As a game designer with the realities of limited time and resources, you just have to do your best to find that middle ground challenge level that will be close to optimal for most of the players who are likely to play the game. And doing that, as my examples hopefully highlighted, can indeed be quite a challenge.

Craig