Modes of Play in Puzzle Quest

November 14th, 2010

In my past article Puzzle Quest – Variation, Lastability and Repair, I diagnosed the problem with Puzzle Quest‘s lack of variation as:

“The main problem is that progress in Puzzle Quest is tied to the underlying system of abstraction (player statistics, equipment, companions) and not the core rules of the game (a modification of Bejewelled). Therefore, while the numbers change, the core gameplay remains largely the same throughout the entire experience. This is all compounded by the fact that every quest is invariably a battle; the same battle played over and over again with only mild statistical variation.”

And suggested that this issue can be overcome if Puzzle Quest were to use a model of variation similar to puzzle games where the conditions governing play are altered as to change the way the player uses the primary mechanics. In puzzle games, these are often referred to as play modes (standard, survival, etc). If Puzzle Quest‘s quests comprised of a series of modes instead of the one mode that it has (matching skull gems to deplete opponent’s HP which I will dub “battle mode”), then the game would be significantly more interesting to players.

Alternative modes can be created by adding or altering the key elements of play. The screenshot below presents the “competitive Bejewelled” elements nicely:

Below are my propositions for alternative quest formats that could be added alongside typical battles to diversify the “competitive Bejewelled” gameplay.

Time Defence

This could be set under the pretense that your kingdom is being attacked by rival armies. This mode follows the rule of “battle mode”, but introduces a time limit which runs down as the participants are taking their turns. When the time is up, the player with the least HP retreats from the battle (so as to save what’s left of their weakened army). In order to stop players from drawing the first attack and then waiting for the timer to expire, both participants will gradually take damage from crossfire. Namely the player will take the grunt of the crossfire in respects to an AI opposition as to fully prevent the player from exploiting the “wait and wither” tactic once they’ve taken a sizable chunk of HP out of their opponent.

The limitation set by the timer creates gives more value to advanced spells which take longer to build up and therefore creates a stronger risk/reward dynamic strategies which have short term and long term benefit.

Hand-to-Hand

Hand-to-hand battles is “battle mode” stripped of all abstraction. Both opponents take a fixed amount of damage based on their 3-gem matches, spells cannot be cast and the number of skulls that generate randomly increase with every turn (as to build to a climax). This mode simulates a real hand-to-hand battle in “competitive Bejewelled” and concentrates the players focus on matching skulls and nothing else.

Mana Climb

Players are stripping an area of mana dry and need to fill a majority quota of mana before their opponent. Matching skulls will take mana away from the other player. This mode is an inversion of the “battle mode”, but in effect allows healing (the inverse of damaging the opponent).

Armour Removal

When battling an opponent with very thick armour, the player must first break the armour by making matches of 4 or more. Any matches less than 4 gems do not take any damage off. Once the player breaks the armour, then the battle resumes as normal. These matches would be a little tougher as the opposition can take pot shots at the player while they’re chipping away at their opponent’s armour. There’s a precedence then to quickly make matches of 4. When the armour is in play, experience and money gems could be disabled as to speed up the game.

Bomb Assault

Bomb gems are added to the board, each bomb is given a number which indicates the number of turns until the bomb explodes. When a bomb explodes, it damages the combatant who is in relative proximity. The closer the bomb is to a combatant, the greater damage sustained from the explosion. Since the board is 8 gems wide, there is no safe area for a bomb to go off. The player must therefore try to make combinations that will move the bombs away from themselves and to the opposite side of the board.

Puzzle Quest, Bejewelled, Limitations and Repair

November 11th, 2010

After I had more or less written my article on Puzzle Quest and variation, I shared my ideas with Richard Terrell who tipped me off to another element of the game which left a strong impression on me. To quote what he said: “Bejeweled is a weak puzzle game because the highest level you can play is very close to the first tactics/strategies you come up with” and later “You make matches on the screen. The bigger the match, the more random gems fall. Because no one can guess the random gems, you’re left to only work with what you see.”.

(As a further impediment to Puzzle Quest, when taking on higher level opponents, it appears that the AI is aware of the random gems and strategises around it, so as to line up large cascades (in-game term referring to matches that drop into place) and award themselves extra turns.

Richard challenged me to think of a solution to this tricky design limitation and this is the best I’ve got:

To remove the randomness of the drops and allow for higher level play, the player ought to see the “off-screen” gems-so why not just reveal it, but not let the player interact with these gems? It makes sense that the revealed, non-interactive part of the board should be 5 gems tall as this is as much as can be cleared vertically in a single go.

My solution also creates other issues though. 5 gems of vertical height is more than half the height of the board. How can this much information be contained on the screen without squishing the board? Also, only revealing 5 gems ahead would only extend the level of play to possibly to 2-3 turns ahead. What if the player is planning even more moves ahead, looking to capitalise on the extra turn granted from a 4-5 gem match or by lining up several strings of cascades (very high level play). I have an interface solution for this as well.

Instead of treating the board as something immobile, add scroll buttons or bars to the right side of the board and allow the player to freely peek at the gems cued up. Interface-wise, this would already fit in fine with the PC version which has its own minimising, maximising and close buttons taken from PC applications. A logical limit for how many rows of gems the player can view would need to be set also. In the DS version, the player could switch between a view of cued gems and the statistics menu in-game.

This solution fixes the random element of play which can become particularly frustrating at times, while also allowing for higher level play. Something that I’m not so sure on is whether gems that are not on the board should count for matches on the board. Hmmmm… back to you Richard. ^_^

Keep reading for my suggestions on alternative quest modes!

Puzzle Quest – Variation, Lastability and Repair

November 8th, 2010

It’s rare that I shelve a game before I complete it. Usually, I try to pay the cheapest price and get the most mileage out of a game. This is a given considering the inexplicable 40-50% price mark-up on Australian games over the States. Further consider that our dollar has recently floated with the USD. However, Puzzle Quest (which ironically enough I didn’t buy, my brother did), has forced me to send it into early retirement on my shelf (also ironic since it’s a digital download, so there’s no shelf) due to the statistics and abstraction that I was previously suspicious about and the implications it has on the game’s variation. So here’s the breakdown:

RPG Meets Competitive Bejewelled

Puzzle Quest is basically a competitive modification of Pop Cap’s mega success Bejewelled (play here) placed in the shell of an RPG. “Competitive Bejewelled” constitutes the battle system with everything else held together through an overworld map with linear routes that connect to towns, caves and everything else you’ve come to expect from RPG maps.

Bejewelled is modified so that the playing “board” contains skulls that when lined up reduce your enemies HP. The coloured gems on the board represent mana that accumulate on every match-3 or above. The mana goes into spells which, once the necessary points of mana are gaineh, can be activated on demand and take the player’s turn. Spells usually impact the layout of gems or temporarily boost the player’s stats and attributes. Examples include poisoning you’re opponent, changing the colour of a gem type, increasing defence or switching HP for a type of mana until the manna depletes fully.

Underpinning the core mechanics of “competitive Bejewelled” are a few sets of staple RPG abstraction systems tied to the player’s avatar. These variables have an invisible presence within the match-3 gameplay. We’ll start with the raw stats which I have pasted outright from the following FAQ:

“Earth Mastery: Increases the amount of Mana you gain for matching Green Gems, increases the chance of taking an extra turn for matching Green Mana, and increases the chance of creating a Wild Card for matching Green Mana.

Fire Mastery: Increases the amount of Mana you gain for matching Red Gems, increases the chance of taking an extra turn for matching Red Mana, and increases the chance of creating a Wild Card for matching Red Mana.

Air Mastery: Increases the amount of Mana you gain for matching Yellow Gems, increases the chance of taking an extra turn for matching Yellow Mana, and increases the chance of creating a Wild Card for matching Yellow Mana.

Water Mastery: Increases the amount of Mana you gain for matching Blue Gems, increases the chance of taking an extra turn for matching Blue Mana, and increases the chance of creating a Wild Card for matching Blue Mana.

Battle: Increases the amount of damage you deal when matching Skulls, increases the chance of taking an extra turn for matching Skulls, and increases the chance of creating a Wild Card for matching Skulls.

Cunning: Increases the effect that Wild Cards have on other gems, increases the amount of money you gain for matching Gold Coins, increases the chance of taking an extra turn for matching Gold Coins, and increases the chance of creating a Wild Card for matching Gold Coins. Also, at the start of battle, the person with the highest Cunning goes first.

Morale: Increases your Life Points, increases the chance of taking an extra turn for matching Purple Stars, increases the chance of creating a Wild Card for matching Purple Stars, and increases your spell resistances.”

As the player defeats enemies and matches up experience gems on the grid, they’ll gain more experience points which go into player levelling that increases these stats. These statistics can be further increased through a 4-slot equipment system for helm and crowns, clothing and armour, weapons and misc items. Your wardrobe can modify the aforementioned stats, another set of stats for your elemental resistance (a percent, not an integer) or add various perks to the player such as decreasing enemy attacks over 5 HP by 1 HP or decreasing the damage sustain by a rival the more they use their spells.

Rounding out the system is the occasional buddy mechanic whereby characters in the narrative can join you in battle when you encounter an enemy type that fits their speciality. In reality they don’t really join the player, they just give a little heads up and then increase some stats for the duration of the battle.

The battle screenshot below summaries what has been said above quite nicely:

The battles are connected through an overworld hub which offers direct paths from place to place. You make progress by completing quests for neighbouring kingdoms and factions which open up other kingdoms which can then be overthrown. Once overthrown the castles accumulate money, adding to the wad of cash built up from battles and matching coin gems. Effectively Puzzle Quest is a game of imperialism.

Kingdoms have a variety of uses beyond handing out quests. The pub offers rumours some of which require a monetary donation (still unsure of why rumours are important), shops obviously sell equipment and lastly there’s the citadel. After earning a little dough you can build the relevant structures to get some use out of the citadel. Once full-funded, the citadel allows the player to research spells by using enemies captured on the field (more on that later), you can improve your core stats by monetary donation, train mounts (haven’t reached this part yet), and forge new items with runes which you can acquire by searching some areas and defeating the monsters within.

Variation and Lastability

With the necessary overview out the way, we can look at this issue which has sucked all my enjoyment out of Puzzle Quest. The main problem is that progress in Puzzle Quest is tied to the underlying system of abstraction (player statistics, equipment, companions) and not the core rules of the game (“competitive Bejewelled”). Therefore, while the numbers change, the core gameplay remains largely the same throughout the entire experience. This is all compounded by the fact that every quest is invariably a battle; the same battle played over and over again with only mild statistical variation.

Many RPGs employ the same model of statistical variation which effectively amounts to the same consistent pattern of attack-attack-heal gameplay that these games begin with, albeit with larger numbers and more extravagant spells. Nothing truly changes from beginning to end as the player’s stats rise along with that of the creatures around them. Players can only defeat stronger enemies if they’ve spent enough time ploughing through inferior ones. It’s unsurprising then that since Puzzle Quest uses the same style of variation, it faces the same problems as many RPGs. The battles become repetitive grinds, very little changes and the same flow of tactics are suffice. Puzzle Quest only really lasts as long as the player’s interest in Bejewelled. Once that’s over then there is little reason to continue playing.

Personally speaking, it was the siege missions (where you overthrow a kingdom by defeating the castle) that prompted me to write this article. I would take on these difficult battles where the statistics and odds where weighed against me, so that I could artificially create challenge for myself, forcing myself to find the best matches and hinder any chance of the opposition taking a blow. Sadly, even superior tactics couldn’t overcome the fact that I was a peon by statistical comparison.

Repair

As we’ve established, Puzzle Quest is a game of two halves: the competitive take on Bejewelled (puzzle) and the RPG overworld, statistics and sub-systems (quest). It even finds its way into the dichotomised title. However, the RPG statistics and the system of variation it imposes are highly detrimental, it would be much better for Puzzle Quest to use the same method of variation as its other half: puzzle games.

In puzzle games with a rigid core system of primary mechanics, the mechanics themselves don’t change in order to create variation, but the conditions of play do. Tetris is a good example. In Tetris DS, Nintendo SPD Group No.2 don’t alter the foundations of the game (that would be ill-advised considering the already great design of Tetris), but instead introduce new modes. These modes include standard, mission, touch, push, catch and puzzle. Here is an outline of these modes taken from Wikipedia:

Standard Mode

Standard mode plays much like traditional Tetris….Standard mode can be played as a one player marathon, multiplayer with two players or one player versus a computer controlled opponent.

Mission mode

Mission mode can be played competitively, or as a marathon to beat your own score. The top screen displays your objective or “mission,” while the bottom screen displays the playing field. A timer in the form of red hearts slowly disappears; when a player completes the objective, the hearts fill anew and the player is assigned a new objective

Push mode

Push mode is a competitive play mode for two players, or one person versus a CPU controlled opponent. Both players start with a 1×1 block floating in their field, and must place Tetriminoes on that to form a base (If a Tetrimino is dropped where it won’t land on anything, it will simply fall out of the screen). Whenever two or more lines are cleared simultaneously, the player’s side of the pile moves down, “pushing” the opponent’s side upwards (The player’s side is seen on the top screen, while the bottom screen shows the opponent’s side upside-down, since the bottoms of both players’ piles push against each other). The goal is to push the pile down so it overlaps the opponent’s danger line.

Touch mode

In Touch mode, a player uses the Nintendo DS stylus to “touch” and “slide” static Tetriminoes to create rows. When enough Tetriminoes have cleared, a cage of balloons is released.

Catch mode

In Catch mode, a player controls one central block, which can be moved in all directions and rotated. The player “catches” falling Tetriminoes, which adhere to the central block; once a player has a segment of 4×4 or greater, it will flash for ten seconds, then detonate. The player can then use the explosion to destroy Metroids, the enemies, or Tetriminoes. While the 4×4 square flashes, more blocks can be attached to it to gain more points when it detonates (the flashing portion only expands if another four blocks are added to one of its sides). Pressing X will immediately detonate the blocks. If any Tetriminoes fall beyond the boundaries, the central block is hit by enemies, or a falling Tetrimino touches the central block while it is being rotated, the player will lose energy. Energy is depicted at the bottom of the screen as a bar, and some energy is restored when a 4×4 or greater area of blocks is detonated. If energy runs out, or Tetriminoes are stacked so far that the central block is longer than the entire screen, the game is over. Catch mode features a Metroid backdrop.

Puzzle mode

In Puzzle mode, the top screen displays the playing field that is already several lines high, with several gaps; the bottom screen displays a limited selection of Tetriminoes to choose from. A player must select the shape and orientation of a Tetrimino to fill the gaps and clear the screen. There is no time limit.

As we can see, Tetris remains the same, but conditions are added or changed to rework and diversify the core puzzle system.

In fairness, Puzzle Quest does include a degree of this type of variation in the form of capture battles. Capture battles are self contained puzzles with only a handful of gems stacked upon each other. The player must re-align the gems so that all gem match up and are removed from the board. These battles pop up as an optional alternative to regular battles where the enemy can be captured and researched for spells at the citadel. Similarly, crafting spells tasks the player with battles that require the player to match several scrolls and a fixed number of mana gems.

Spells, are also something of an outlier, and interject additional elements of strategy into common battles. The spells which change the core elements (gem types, HP, mana, layout of gems) are the ones that are truly effective. Furthermore, spells require specific amounts of mana to be cast and that fuels the player to strategise which colours to align. The strategy here is dual layered as the player wants to align the mana they need to cast spells and at the same time obscure their opponent from gaining the mana they need to cast their most powerful spells. Most spells themselves also change conditions on the board that have ramifications for both players and again, there is a element of strategy further involved in deciding when and where to activate spells. As the player gains more levels, they also learn new spells which diversifies play somewhat.

When it comes to the crunch though, the quests in Puzzle Quest fall under the one mode of play (which I will call “battle mode”) and nothing else. What Puzzle Quest needs is an array of new match types or scenarios which alter the way the player interacts with the “competitive Bejewelled” component. These variations should then be sprinkled in amongst the “battle mode” quests as to deviate from the regular battle to the death gameplay.

Stay tuned for the next instalment where I offer some suggestions for new modes of play for Puzzle Quest.

Conclusion

Puzzle Quest is a straight combination of the puzzle and RPG genre where the primary puzzle mechanics (a competitive modification of Bejewelled) take the form of battles and the RPG elements constitute underlying abstraction and an interface for progression (a map and the increase of statistics as the player levels). Puzzle Quest advances on the player’s stats (RPG side of the fence) which have little influence on the core gameplay (puzzling) and therefore there is little variation in the core gameplay as the player makes their way through Puzzle Quest. The quests are all exactly the same: battles. For these reasons I tired of the game very quickly, even though the battles (Bejewelled) are interesting.

Puzzle Quest needs more variation to the “competitive Bejewelled” puzzle elements and it ought to look to other puzzle games to for clear examples. Puzzle Quest‘s core elements ought to remain fixed, however, the conditions that govern the game ought to change. That is, by modifying the win state, gems, HP and other elements, and the injecting these new modes of play in amongst regular battles, Puzzle Quest will be a more diverse title and likely to hold the player’s interest for longer.

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