unforum

[Everything's Magic]

Starting Out

[labfly]

elonka dunin

[vpisteve]

Don't necessarily think of them as puzzles, think of them as "gates." The ARG is a narrative, separated by various gates that players have to open to unlock more story/assets.

Some are easy to open and pass through, some are tough. The important things are to have them make sense in the fiction (which can be the toughest part), and to have the "prize" weighted in accordance with the difficulty of the puzzle.

But yeah, first I'd study previous ARGs for good examples of what (and sometimes what not) to do. My recommendation? The Project Mu archives, which gives a play-by-play of the Metacortechs game from a player perspective.

Good luck!

[Will 2.0]

From doing this sort of thing a couple times, for puzzles you can take it any way you wish.

Steve is right, they're gates to the next "scene" per se. Sometimes they can be good timewasters for the players while you prepare a video or something for the next stage. Puzzles should be something that really makes you think, that makes you look into something, such as history. Puzzles don't even have to be made that apparent, look at Tom Tooman for reference.

I think it's best for the player if they actually learn something while doing it, whether about the game if it has history involved or something completely OOG because that's what an ARG is, to me at least, a learning experience and to hear an amazing story.

Good luck Magic. You can PM me or email me anytime for more advice, I'm working on a new project myself.

[SirQuady]

[Everything's Magic]

What is a good site to host things like log-ins and hide stuff in the source code? It has to be free though. I don't know any coding, though. I'll have to ask you guys out for a bit of help on that type of stuff.

I'm just looking for a password protection i.e. Jamieandteddy.com password, that type of stuff. And lots of other things, I just really want a website to be in-depth like that.

[Lysithea]

I strongly agree with all of the advice above to read about previous games (both sucessful and unsuccessful).

Have you considered teaming up with some people to help you with this project? The PM Recruitment Area is a good place to find talented people, including many skilled at coding.

[Everything's Magic]

[Jas0n]

[Everything's Magic]

[Karensa]

Since you're not on the heavy skilled side, you don't need databases and cgi and all that stuff anyway so while there are a lot of options, I wanted to share this one. I've used this since 1997 for practically every site I've ever done, they've been superbly reliable - and for what it's worth, they're located in south louisiana and actually did not get blasted offline when Katrina and Rita came to town - every one of my sites went uninterrupted...save but the electric company ;-p

http://www.directnic.com

Sign up for an account and then use the search to find the domains you want, add to cart, submit info, done. It'll be live in roughly 10 minutes, if not sooner.

Domain names are $15 a year and bannerless hosting is also $15 a year so you'd be putting up $30, and that's it, done with. Nothing monthly. This one's great for sites that aren't liable to get a zillion hits a month.

I know you don't want to spend money if you can help it - nobody does -but if your game is to appear "legit" or realistic, it's worth it. Besides, you can always justify it pretty easily with *Hey, I'm gonna blow 30 bucks on some form of crap in the next year and nothing to show for it so why not*!

Don't be misled though - a lot of people use the free services, but consider it should be relevant to what you're doing. A fictional fortune 500 company isn't going to have a freeweb website. Mary Jane looking for her missing cousin, or Jack and Jill sharing pohotos of their Hawaiian trip where they found that strange tiki with curious symbols - they can get away with blogger or wordpress, and even myspace.


Good luck...

[konamouse]

From a player perspective:

Please HAVE A GOOD STORY FIRST!

Then you can decide where the puzzles FIT INTO THE STORY.

If the story sucks, the puzzles won't matter. And if the puzzles don't belong to the story (a reason for the players to need to solve a puzzle to further the story) then the story won't make sense.

Did I mention: HAVE A GOOD STORY?? Otherwise you are just creating a puzzle trail.

And I'll second the recommendation to read Dave's book. And read through some other games (*cough* check my signature for links to "story so far" threads of past successful ARGs).

[Everything's Magic]

Puzzles are barely part of my ARG, it's almost all story based where they get the info as time goes on. There's just one site that is based around puzzles to hack into, then you can actually get the information on the site.

Thanks for all the help though everyone. I've pretty much gotten all the information I need.

[Jas0n]

EM - remember too that even though a lot of people nit pick about puzzles.. the story itself is a puzzle as the players are finding pieces of it and putting it together to create the overall picture.

[Everything's Magic]