Students Blog

◙ Overview:

“Cold War Confusion” is designed to be used by four individuals to solve a series of puzzles emphasizing communication and teamwork. It sets the players in a CIA building during the Cold War in which they have been trapped by a saboteur. The players must work together to get out of the building before the self destruct sequence runs out of time and the building explodes. The game is housed in the MMOG Second Life.

The layout of the game is a basic design of four rooms connected by shared walls in a rectangular configuration. Each of the rooms contains one puzzle and one player. However, the player cannot solve the puzzle with just the information in the room. Instead, the player must work with the other players to get all of the necessary clues to solve the puzzle.

The Game Master, GM, is the central authoritative figure who overviews the game to ensure that everything works properly and also influences certain events. The GM is played by one of the game designers to make sure that the game is set up properly and that the players obey the set rules. The GM also distributes the game rules to the players in the beginning. While it would be nice to make the game autonomous, the GM is a central figure for now.

There are three main puzzles that must be solved first. These puzzles are focused on math and sequences, verbal and information gathering, and chemistry and verbal. If the players do not communicate with the other players, they cannot complete their puzzle. Some of the clues can be figured out by looking into the other rooms, but the player cannot see into all four rooms, only their own room and partially into two other rooms. After solving each of the three puzzles, the player is given a partial code sequence which is used to complete the fourth and final puzzle.

The fourth puzzle is very simple: it simply depends on getting the three pieces of information from the other three players and inputting them into the puzzle. The simplicity of this puzzle is to give this player, the Commander, freedom to focus on the progress of the game and the other players. The Commander is a critical piece of the game if played properly. The Commander is used to ensure that all players are receiving the necessary information, and the player can coordinate information in the game to not only check on the progress of the other players but also help the other players to solve their puzzles. It is also the Commander’s job to determine who the Mole is.

The Mole is an optional game character that can be added to enhance the experience of veteran players. At the beginning of the game, the GM chooses a player at random (except the Commander) and asks if they would like to be a mole and work for the KGB. The Mole’s job is then to prevent the other players from solving the puzzles. The Mole also has special abilities to hinder the group’s progress. However, the Mole cannot be too obvious in their efforts to sabotage the group’s efforts or else the Commander will detect the Mole and remove that player from the game. If this occurs, the Mole’s puzzle is automatically solved and any necessary information in the room is given to the other players by the GM. Because of the challenges offered by this option, it is not recommended for beginner players, especially those unfamiliar with Second Life.

◙ Design Process:

Cold War Confusion requires players to cooperate and solve puzzles games in a restricted environment during height of the Cold War era. But it wasn’t always that way. Since its development began mid-way through the semester, the designers have had to grapple with the realities of time and space restrictions, as well as the difficulty of making a game with little prior knowledge of how the game engine works. What we ultimately created has been fun to both play and design, but the experience has also been a valuable learning experience in the game-making process.

When we first met to brainstorm what kind of a game we could make, our first consideration was the restricted amount of space available within Second Life. This was not necessarily a disadvantage; it encouraged us to think more creatively about what mechanics we introduced. Most third or first person titles that exist in the real world, be they adventure or action titles, require the player to move throughout a world in order to progress through the game. Consequently, we built our game to exist within a restricted space almost from the very beginning.

Yet while it was clear from the start that we needed to design a game within a closed space, and that it had to be cooperative in nature, we did not arrive upon the concept of a Cold War-era CIA game as quickly. A couple of ideas we considered included a gardening game, in which players had to tend their own plots of land until their crops had grown tall enough that could reach level of the game, as well as a concept that took advantage of Second Life’s avatar mutability, and required players to guess the identity of a specific character among a group of clones.

We eventually decided on a Cold War-themed game for two main reasons. First, recreating the offices of the CIA within Second Life seemed more plausible than creating a digital garden from scratch, due to the pervasiveness of free furniture throughout the game. Secondly, the CIA motif, inspired in part by the Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell series, just seemed cooler than anything else.

Once we had fixed upon a basic concept, we set about created the game world within Second Life. The task of physically building the game using Second Life’s object creation system proved relatively easy to manage. However, once we had moved beyond that to implementing the puzzles into the game, things became much more complicated. We ran into limitation with what we could do with the scripting. Programming objects wasn’t as easy as we had initially thought. These problems forced us to alter our game in two significant ways. First, we had to simplify many of the puzzles to accommodate as few scripts as possible. Secondly, the role of the Mole was greatly reduced from our original concept.

Downplaying the Mole was probably the most difficult compromise we had to make during the development of the game, because during playtesting we found that players really enjoyed the concept of the Mole and would have liked to see it implemented more extensively. Still, what we created for our final product is still fun and takes advantage of the best of what Second Life has to offer.

◙ Room and Puzzle Details:

• The Workspace

The Workspace contains the Mathematical Puzzle. The player in this room must enter a sequence of numbers into a keypad in order to receive part of the Master Code, which is necessary to win the game.

To determine the sequence of numbers, the computer in the room provides a series of clues, which are mathematical equations in which the missing operands can be determined by counting the number of objects in the other rooms. Thus, to solve the equations, the player must ask the Archives, Laboratory, and Command Rooms for information.

Even after all the clues in the computer, the player must figure the next two numbers in the sequence to complete it. If they cannot, the ARPANET Uplink (in the Commander’s Room) will give them a major clue to solve the puzzle.

In the workspace, there are also clues for the other puzzles, most notably information about the order of chemicals in the Laboratory (on the bulletin board) and determining the color and name of a secret codebook for the Archives (on a whiteboard, not pictured).

This is the simplest of the three puzzles, but that does not necessarily mean the easiest. It requires the least dependence on others, as one can try looking through the windows to find out information, and guesswork can help if one can figure out the pattern from a partial sequence.

• The Laboratory

The Laboratory contains the Chemistry Puzzle. The player is charged with mixing a sequence of chemicals in order to make C4, which will give them another piece of the Master Code.

To input the chemical sequence, the player must click on the cauldron and then type the sequence of chemicals, which come from four of the six beakers on the lab counter. To correctly determine the correct composition and order, the Lab player must use the clues given by the beakers, which create a logical framework that excludes some chemicals and some orders of chemicals.

To preclude some guesswork, information is located in the Archives and Workspace that can be discovered with some careful sleuthing. The Archives tells which four of the six chemicals are needed, while information in the Workspace is critical for determining the order of the chemicals.

There are also clues for the other rooms in the Laboratory, most notably a clue behind the periodic table that helps the Archives figure out the color of their secret codebook.

The Laboratory is a medium-complexity puzzle. The player must juggle multiple levels of information, and is dependent on clues from the other rooms.

• The Archives

The Archives, the Verbal-Geographic-Historical puzzle, is the hardest in the game. The player is charged with breaking a secret code, which is written on the chalkboard. To break the secret code, the Archives player must discover five discrete pieces of information, and write them on the chalkboard (by clicking on it).

As each clue is written down, the code on the board is updated, to reflect the puzzle being solved piece-by-piece. Once fully solved, a codeword is written on the board, which the Commander can use to retrieve a piece of the Master Code.

Each of the five pieces of information requires a different strategy, but many are based on the information located in the filing cabinets. There are lists to cross-check, clues to decode, pointers to other rooms – all the information needs to be processed and filtered to make sense. There are even visual clues on the slide viewer.

This puzzle is the one that will probably require the use of ARPANET to solve. There are two parts of the puzzle which need the full cooperation of the other rooms to solve, not to mention the different levels of information the player must sift through. This room will probably be the last to be solved, and requires dedication and a quick mind.

• The Commander

The Commander’s office is the nerve center of the game and the hub of the puzzles. All the master puzzle answers go to this room to be used, and this room contains information needed to solve the other puzzles.

This room is unique in that it does not have a puzzle of its own to solve. Instead it contains high-level meta-clues to help the other players find information. For example, while the Commander doesn’t know what chemicals are needed to make C4, they can tell the Laboratory where to look for that information.

Also located in the room is an ARPANET Uplink, which is a major puzzle-solver. To use it, one of the puzzles must be already solved. The commander can then access it, and use it to massively assist one of the remaining puzzles. However, the mole’s abilities can interfere with ARPANET, and if its rules are broken, the group suffers a major time penalty.

Finally, the Commander’s room contains the Pyramid, where the Master Code needs to be entered to shut down the base’s self-destruct. Once this is entered, the game is won. If, instead, the timer hits thirty-five minutes before the Code is entered, the group loses and the Mole, if there is one, wins.

The Commander plays a special role in keeping the team on task and making sure information is flowing. The clock keeps the time, which lets the Commander know the urgency of events. The Commander also cannot be the Mole. Coupled with the fact that all information eventually passes through the Commander’s office, this player is best suited for rooting out the Mole.

◙ Playtest Results (Summary)

Playtest Schedule

• Tuesday, 11/08/05, 8-9 pm
• Wednesday, 11/09/05, 8-9 pm
• Thursday, 11/10/05, 8-9 pm (Server Outage)
• Friday, 11/11/05, 8-9 pm
• Thursday, 11/17/05, 8-9 pm
• Monday, 11/21/05, 8-9 pm (No-Show Testers)
• Sunday, 11/27/05, 8-9 pm (Testers Broke Game)

Playtest Procedure

All playtests were played by people outside of the team and moderated by two members of Team Deviance, except in the case of a no-show tester, in which case one moderator would sit in. Each player was given an introductory notecard to explain the setup for the game and the overall puzzle. The card gave each player a hint on how to begin. After the test had been completed, players were given individual questionnaires to fill out based on their experience in the game. Afterwards, the moderators and the players discussed the play experience as a group.

*Note: In order to perfect the base of the game, the Mole concept was not introduced in this round of playtesting until 11/17, nor do these results include the numerous team playtests.

11/08/05

Testers:
• Griffon Axon
• Kateye Kojima
• Jib Elytis (Elliot)
• Zedian Ogopogo (Paul)

Good Aspects:
• Interesting concept.

Needs Improvement:

• Not nearly enough time. Clock should be closer to 30 minutes than 10 minutes.
• Players spent as much time teleporting through walls and abusing camera controls as they did actual working on the puzzles.
• Lack of tension: Needed a clock or a ticking sound to emphasize time restraint.
• Players couldn’t hear standard chat unless they were near the center of the complex.
• Some of the rooms (the archive room in particular) loaded the player with more information than she could reasonably process in the given time limit.
• Some clues (unintentionally) misled the players.

11/09/05

Testers:
• ReallyRick Metropolitan
• June Urutmp Murdock
• Blake Saramago
• kk Mechanique (Failed to show.)

Good Aspects:
• Puzzles: Interesting. Some players thought they were challenging; others a little too easy. This is likely because the puzzles in some rooms are considerably more difficult than others.
• Teamwork: All players remarked on enjoying the teamwork aspect to solve the complex puzzles.

Needs Improvement:

• Lack of tension: Needed a clock or a ticking sound to emphasize time restraint.
• Some of the rooms (the archive room in particular) loaded the player with more information than she could reasonably process in the given time limit. Confusing.

Other:

• Players on this date communicated not only via the IM system within the game, but three of them also spoke in a voice chat program. They concluded that form of communication was particularly helpful for this communication-intensive puzzle setup. Based on their comments, we would recommend that future players should communicate in this manner for maximum efficiency and involvement in the game.

11/10/05

Testers:
• ReallyRick Metropolitan
• June Urutmp Murdock
• Blake Saramago
• Teri LaFollette

Session was cancelled due to server outage for updates.

11/11/05

Testers:
• Satchmo Prototype
• Griffon Axon
• JuneUrutmp Murdock
• Kateye Kojima

Good Aspects:
• Puzzles: Interesting. Some players thought they were challenging; others a little too easy. This is likely because the puzzles in some rooms are considerably more difficult than others.
• Teamwork: All players remarked on enjoying the teamwork aspect to solve the complex puzzles.

Needs Improvement:

• Lack of tension: Needed a clock or a ticking sound to emphasize time restraint.
• Some of the rooms (the archive room in particular) loaded the player with more information than she could reasonably process in the given time limit. Confusing.

Other:

Players on this date communicated not only via the IM system within the game, but three of them also spoke in a voice chat program. They concluded that form of communication was particularly helpful for this communication-intensive puzzle setup. Based on their comments, we would recommend that future players should communicate in this manner for maximum efficiency and involvement in the game.

11/17/05

Testers:
• Teri LaFollette
• ‘Alek’
• Cut Perse
• Kateye Kojima

Good Aspects:
• Mole Concept – Both the mole and other players thought it was interesting, though the commander was uncertain as to how to deal with it.
• Clock created tension, fast-paced environment.
• Chemistry lab puzzle was appropriate difficulty.
• Math puzzle was timed appropriately, if perhaps a little too easy.
• Forced communication was “team-building”.

Needs Improvement:
• The Mole thought that role is too powerful.
• Game was confusing, too hard, needed more explanation.
• The commander’s seemed to be dissatisfied with the withdrawn nature of his role; though he has much information to go through, he has no actual puzzle to solve.
• Difficult for the commander to know what to communicate to other players.

◙ Game Iterations:

Due to player feedback, we made the following alterations to the initial design:

• Information in the Archive’s Room was drastically reduced to make it realistically possible to finish.
• Time limited was extended from 10 minutes to 30 minutes, as that was more appropriate.
• Red herrings and unnecessary information was reduced.
• Information was shifted from the Archive’s Room to the Commander’s room; this made it easier for the Archive’s agent to finish his or her puzzle while also giving the Commander more to do.
• Information was labeled with hints as to the room it should be given to. More hints were included in all puzzles.
• Critical pieces of information were marked visually within the game. (Ex. A blank piece of paper tacked on a bulletin board was edited to display a chemical formula to indicate its importance to the chemical lab.
• Once the mole variant was introduced, the time limit was extended to 35 minutes to help offset the additional difficulty; mole powers were reduced.