07.06.07
Technical issues
Comments are down because OTP has changed hosts. Something got budged up with the SQL database, and it’s probably a small wonder the rest of this blog is intact. Larry is working on it 
All good, comments are up again.
07.01.07
Puzzles vs. Problems
Okay so I made it past the steamboat level in Hitman 4 and on to the final level, which I hope to finish today. But Blood Money (and Warren’s latest blog post) got me thinking again about the idea of problem-oriented game design. I’d like to think the idea is mine, but first of all it’s doubtlessly been formulated differently by many other people before, and secondly even if I were the first person to put these ideas into words, entire games seem to have already been based on them. Hitman 4 being the best example I can think of right now. Better, even, than Deus Ex.
The idea is that you can approach the creation of a challenge for a game in two ways: You can treat it as a puzzle, where there is only one way for your player to overcome the obstacle you place for him, or you can treat it as a problem where no specific solution is given, just a premise and a set of “tools”. Let me exemplify.
