How would you re-design BttF:tG (both puzzle-wise and gameplay-wise) ...

[yoshifan]

Alot of people are saying that EP 1 is too easy, being new to these kind of games I find it fine, but what puzzles would you change to make harder? just curious.

[Farlander]

That depends on what you're calling 'puzzles'. I'll quote myself from another topic.

I'm very excited about BttF and liked the first episode very much, BUT. It's not 'easy' The term 'difficulty' is practically non-existent in BttF, even in an easy way, and that's, in my opinion, bad (and I hope TellTale will do better). You have a dog and a shoe from 1931, and have to find a clue to learn where in time to go - that's not 'easy', that's a 'no-brainer'. After that, when on the street, the only person to interact with being an old lady (and having a shoe from 1931) - that's not easy, that's a no-brainer.

I'm not saying that ALL the stuff in the first episode are no-brainers, but in general it is. And that's disappointing, because I generally liked the puzzles that there actually WERE in the game, and they were easy. So my main complaint over the puzzles is not their DIFFICULTY, but their QUANTITY, which is very, very small.

So, in essence, I think that there aren't practically any puzzles in BttF:Ep1. Now, how to transform what we have INTO puzzles (even easy ones) that's another question, and I won't answer it right now due to the fact that it has to be something well thought-out and you generally don't have time to think everything out in 'writing on the move posts'.

[markeres]

It could be something as simple as "adding more variables". I think a lot of the easiness stems from the fact that there is such a limited number of objects in any given scene/situation, that the solution to the puzzle is all but obvious. For example, the one Farlander cites above (and for the sake of this argument, I will call it a puzzle, since that's what Telltale intended it to be), finding Edna: You have a shoe and a dog. That's it. So, the solution has pretty much been given to you before you've even had a chance to think about any kind of "puzzle". Some more red herrings, objects in the environment to lead you astray, would be nice. I know if you give Einstein the tape recorder, he'll scratch at the DeLorean, but this isn't so much a red herring as a way of teaching you the puzzle.

You could also go another way and have more steps per puzzle. For example, not just giving the shoe to Einstein, but maybe you have to attract his attention somehow, or he doesn't go straight to Edna's but is distracted by some other smell, and you have to figure out what that smell is and get rid of the source.

Another thing could be switching up the puzzle dynamics. Most of the interactivity in BTTF was "click this to trigger the next event", which, except for hearing new dialogue, does get old after a while. One of my favorite puzzles in the episode was the experiment in Young Doc's lab. You actually had to think about why you were clicking things in that one. The only problem with it was, if you screw up the first time, Young Doc immediately comes in and gives you the instruction for the puzzle: "Listen to the words I'm emphasizing". I would have preferred this instruction on the second or third screw-up, to give me time to learn the puzzle myself.

I know Telltale wants to make casual adventure games for a mass audience, but I think you can do this while making medium-difficulty puzzles, especially with a built-in hint system that gives you the answer to the puzzle. Having easy puzzles that teach you how to play an adventure game is fine for the first two or three puzzles, but the only ones that required any kind of real thinking (for me) in the episode were the last three big ones: getting the alcohol, the experiment in Young Doc's lab, and rescuing Doc from the paddywagon, and even those were easy (again, for me). So, that's about 75-80% of the episode with "Intro to Adventure Games"-level puzzles. I wouldn't mind this so much if there wasn't a built-in hint system, but since there is, it wasn't very satisfying.

All that said, I did enjoy the episode for the story, dialogue, and voice acting alone, and I'm very much looking forward to episode 2 (hopefully with more challenging puzzles ).

[Falanca]

-Marty hits the pipe only when you use your tape recorder with.
-Teen Doc asks you to find ingredients in order to make something to hold the door. You find them in various places and bring them to Doc.
-A tricky dialouge puzzle with Kid Tannen to make HIM say the line required to be recorded to bring Arthur down. It may not be something as simple as "get down here you little runt!" but an actual password Kid Tannen uses for Artie, which is obscure so it will make it hard for Marty to make Kid say it during the chase scene.

Little additional segments like those would give a lot of depth to the already existing puzzles...

[markeres]

Originally Posted by Falanca

-Marty hits the pipe only when you use your tape recorder with.
-Teen Doc asks you to find ingredients in order to make something to hold the door. You find them in various places and bring them to Doc.
-A tricky dialouge puzzle with Kid Tannen to make HIM say the line required to be recorded to bring Arthur down. It may not be something as simple as "get down here you little runt!" but an actual password Kid Tannen uses for Artie, which is obscure so it will make it hard for Marty to make Kid say it during the chase scene.

Little additional segments like those would give a lot of depth to the already existing puzzles...

Those are all very good ideas.

Some more ideas:

- Doc doesn't just simply remember his phone number and give it to you. He only remembers part of it and you have to do something or find something to help him remember it. Doc says he remembers the phone number because of a mnemonic, but what if he couldn't remember the mnemonic? That would be a very Doc thing to do, and could make for a good puzzle. For example, those proverbs in the soup kitchen could serve a purpose. Maybe one of them was the mnemonic.

- You can't just take Edna's bike, you have to convince her to give it to you somehow, or distract her while you take it. Or, you can't just fit the rocket onto the bike, you have to do something else to modify it.

- Finding 1931 clothes should have been a puzzle in itself. Marty just showing up in era-appropriate clothes was my least favorite part of the episode.

[Trenchfoot]

Very nice ideas around here. Here are some of mine...

- The chase scene should be playable. Instead of just making it a normal cutscene, make it an interactive cutscene. For example, if you lose, Tannen gets the hat and you have to pick it up again by tricking him in a new way.

- The shoe shining should also be a puzzle. I don't know exactly how, but it could have worked somehow.

- This is not a puzzle, but a suggestion: I would have loved a sense of urgency in the game. After all, the time is passing by and you only have a couple of hours to do all this stuff! I doubt its appropiate for BTTF, but it could be interesting for the gran finale of the series. Kinda like in the end of ToMI.

[Vainamoinen]

I never wanted this to be a "difficult" adventure game. But all the prior posters have chosen the right direction in their suggestions: to really, really, really EXPAND the puzzle experience, just like it was with previous Telltale releases until this feels like a game again.

I don't know, but maybe TTG feels restricted too much by the thought of "what could happen in a fourth movie and what would not". Naturally, this is a game and not a movie, so at least some things would be different.

The possibilities of the '31 clocktower square location weren't even remotely used. As beautiful as it was to look at and walk around in, the exploration and puzzle elements were just not satisfactory.

[Guinea]

Here are some suggestions that I came up with from the top of my head:

1) If the game asks me about my skill and experience as a gamer, then good grief, let me ponder at least a MINUTE about the first non-tutorial task in the game: finding the diary. I just clicked on the clocks and then the game's like "NOOoo not the clocks look at the scale model of hill valley!" And I'm like "wow thanks, so if that's what an experienced gamer gets, what do the new comers get?"

2) Reverse puzzle with Biff and the guitar. I first talked to George about Biff, so I didn't even know you're supposed to do that to solve the puzzle.

3) 1932 clothes? That alone would have been worth a puzzle, I mean where is Marty getting that stuff from? I can't even imagine GEORGE having those somewhere, but fine, maybe you just wanted to get the story rolling and it would have required a lot of extra rooms in 1986 to set this up.

4) The Simon-says puzzle could have become a little harder, like someone said in another thread. I mean, you have asked for the player's skill in the beginning, so nothing stops you from making it the way it was for the beginners and a bit more challenging for the guys who said "yes I know how to play games".
Also, why is it necessary that Doc tells me "YOU NEED TO LISTEN TO THE WORDS I EMPHASIZE!!!!!" the very first time I mess up? I'm sure that I would have figured that out myself eventually. Again, why do you ask for the experience in the beginning and why is there a hint level setting?


You have asked for the player's experience in adventure games, TellTale. Please use that information!
It doesn't need to be like the hard and normal mode from the Monkey Island 2 and 3 games where different puzzles had to be designed for both levels (because you do not have the resources for that), but at least puzzles with scalable difficulty, such as the simon-says puzzle, could benefit LOTS from this and it would not require much work.
And you have a hint system. Don't worry about puzzle difficulty, you have a hint system! If the design team has to decide "hm I have an idea for a puzzle, but idk if we should use the easy one or the hard one", go for the *hard* one, because you have a hint system which helps people who can't solve the hard one to solve the hard one.
People who don't want to solve puzzles anyway won't mind being helped by the hint system, and thus won't mind the hard puzzles in general, because they won't have to solve them because the hint system does it for them. Everyone is happy. (Except for those people who like solving the simple puzzles and think they're clever, but I really hope that these guys aren't the majority of your customers...)


Hm, the last part may be a bit off-topic, but I think it relates to improving puzzle difficulty while not alienating the lesser motivated players, so I leave it in.

[Rather Dashing]

Guinea's points are so far the best, I think. I mean, by the time I got to the rocket creation puzzle, I had forgotten that not being told exactly what to do at the very slightest provocation(LISTEN TO THE WORDS I AM EMPHASIZING!!!!) simply isn't normal, as much as I resented it.

I think puzzle COMPLEXITY needs to take a step up, and perhaps dropping down the difficulty can remove/simply steps of a puzzle in tiers. This may not be a proper solution now, though.

Things that could help that would be easy to implement:

-When Hints are set to zero, that was an active action by the player. It's an input that should mean something. I don't know what "High" hint levels do, but for 0 try to remove heavily guiding dialog or at least make the prompts take longer to occur. Things like "HERE IS THE ANSWER TO THE PUZZLE" from Emmett after the first mistake makes me feel like the game thinks I'm too dumb to even figure out that the words he's YELLING are the ones I should concentrate on(especially since I had subtitles on, and that capitalized words in the sentences....making it easier. =P).

-Make puzzles that deal with figuring out how something works. Something that requires little or no inventory and can be confined to a room, but still be a brain-teaser of some sort. The soup kitchen puzzle was nice in some ways, because you had to know how the whole system worked. If possible, make most/all of the prompts player-initiated, though. When I learned things about how the soup kitchen worked, it seemed like the game was playing some parts of that arbitrarily. Make it so that a player can explore the constructed system or device and get a general idea pretty quickly of what they're supposed to do with it, and then make figuring that out by messing with a few close-together junction points. I think this kind of puzzle would be accessible without being insulting, as long as people aren't yelling answers in your ear the moment you make the slightest mistake no matter what your hint level. High hint-level players, on the other hand, can be free to have their hints.

-Add more "steps" to the puzzles. Make the obvious action fail in some way, and then have a secondary action that has to be performed. Why does just clicking on Einstein have him attack Kid Tannen? Why can't we find a way to "get" him to attack Kid? It seems like Einstein was an arbitrary "Run Away" button, when you could have made the escape after obtaining the recording something of a puzzle(with a solution that could be repeated easily if for some reason the player did not actually get a recording).

I'd write more, because there are a ton of ways that Back to the Future: The Game could be improved in the The Game category. The problem is, I don't think Telltale wants to make a good, engaging game that doesn't look down on the player like a younger brother or a mentally-disabled child. As long as games are designed for Dave Grossman's mother-in-law, everyone above her on the curve is going to suffer. And while Dave Grossman's mother-in-law might finally be able to play a Telltale game, almost everyone who has any interest whatsoever in playing games happens to be somewhat above her level when it comes to understanding and reacting to gameplay cues, or wanting to play games. You could make a film for people who hate movies by scrolling text on a projector screen, but it's not actually a film. And you can make a game accessible by ripping out gameplay elements one by one, but at some point you end up with something less than a game.

...I just realized that I've gone a bit off-topic. Excuse me.

[BrendanK]

Overall it needed more variables for you to deal with so it requires actual "thinking", rather than almost having the solution the only thing you can click on. I mean c'mon, you can't say you weren't disappointed that during the first scene in the parking lot there were only 3 clickable places to "explore", Doc, the plutonium box and the toolbox.

I did like the fuel sequence, that actually required you to think and act in order to progress. The game needs more moments like these.

Another thing is to not re-use solutions. ie the tape recorder and Einsteins hunting skills. I felt that was a bit cheap.

[jaden551]

I tought of a way to make the clothes a puzzle!

They are hidden behind the news papers and when you go to grab them you are kicked out and you have to find a way to get up there a second time. It could be you have to do something really bad in front of her house so she has to come down and stop you so you can sneak up.That would only take 2 or 3 cut scenes and sbout ten lines of dialogue, the bad thing could be simiar to doc's refinery in the 30s and can use the same model as that.

A small tought and a puzzle that would take less than 10mb extra.

[Falanca]

Actually trying to find a trashcan to find garbage in it to use for Mr. Fusion...

[Strayth]

I don't know, but maybe TTG feels restricted too much by the thought of "what could happen in a fourth movie and what would not". Naturally, this is a game and not a movie, so at least some things would be different.

Excuse me but they fail either way.

GPS Einstein kinda destroyed the feeling that the puzzles would be anything logical in real life. (that among many others)

[Farlander]

GPS Einstein kinda destroyed the feeling that the puzzles would be anything logical in real life. (that among many others)

It's worth pointing out that Einstein both times brings you to the same place, not far from the Town Square. Not that it makes his GPSness any better. Though Arthur's hat is more justified than Edna's shoe - at least Arthur walked by not too long ago so his smell COULD be there (on the other hand, wouldn't the smell of the peanuts on the hat be stronger than the smell of Arthur? I.e. how would Einstein recognize it?)

[PrivateJoker]

Remove hints altogether.

[Secret Fawful]

The first thing I'd do to make the game harder is to put some puzzles in it. It felt kind of weird just walking from one cutscene to another.

[Ash735]

Originally Posted by Guinea

1) If the game asks me about my skill and experience as a gamer, then good grief, let me ponder at least a MINUTE about the first non-tutorial task in the game: finding the diary. I just clicked on the clocks and then the game's like "NOOoo not the clocks look at the scale model of hill valley!" And I'm like "wow thanks, so if that's what an experienced gamer gets, what do the new comers get?"

THIS, I remember first playing and just checking out things in the lab, and then George McFly kept repeating that "HEY MARTY, WHY DON'T YOU CHECK OUT THAT SCALE MODEL??"

[McSuperfly101]

They need to prevent having so many reverse puzzles. I didn't even realize that there was a puzzle involving telling George not to intervene when Biff grabs the guitar until my second playthough. They could have simply not had that particular dialogue branch open up until after the initial cutscene plays.

I think overall the game just needs more steps to the puzzles, like how you just talk to young Doc and he whips up a device to prop the door open with no challenge involved at all.

Plus, when I got him to do that on my first playthough I had no idea why I was asking him to do so. Like I said before, getting him to make the door stop shouldn't be an option until you try to knock over the barrels and they end up on the floor. Then Marty says "Hmmm, I need to prop the door open somehow" and the player thinks "Ok, how can I go about doing that?" As it is I simply start by talking to all the characters in the room, getting all the information I can as I'm sure most other players do too and all of a sudden I've solved a puzzle I didn't even know existed.

[Jon NA]

... If you had the same plot to work on?
i'm mostly curious to know how would you re-design it puzzle-wise.
I'll contribute to this thread later, right now, I'm just curious to hear your replies.

[Vainamoinen]

You know, this idea isn't a first...