I have 19 days left before my self-imposed deadline for writing all of the puzzles for my Christian Point and Click adventure game. Yesterday was spent trying to come up with an idea for where the player could get hold of a pile of rags. The constant temptation when writing puzzles like this is always to introduce yet another character, like some street urchin trying to make a tidy profit selling them, but I’m quite keen to keep things simple and reuse existing characters and locations as much as possible. Every character you add means yet another set of concept sketches, yet another model, yet another voice actor – you get the idea!
I read quite a helpful interview with Tim Schafer the other day about his process when writing games like Day of the Tentacle. He talked about starting first with the “world” your game takes place in, imagining what’s going on and what the characters are like, and then using that to generate the ideas for the puzzles. I’m trying to do that a bit by reading up on the historical locations my game takes place in. We’ll see if it leads anywhere!
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