Readit NewsI'm not sure how to parse this.. you've done hundreds of interviews, as the candidate, in 9 years of experience?
On a mobile device the page requires miles of scrolling to go through a few sentences while rotating around a meaningless graphic.
Signal to noise ratio is abysmal.
I can't easily reconcile that with the linked puzzle document. If I pick on something at random (page 16, Puzzle #12: Get Starter [0]). I don't see any particular advantage to abstract thinking or even superficially understanding the scene. It looks like the player is expected to brute-force solutions. The situation overall is pretty entertaining and we learn a little bit about the world; but the actual puzzle - even with the design docs - doesn't give any hints about how players are meant to come up with that solution thoughtfully. The design doc doesn't seem to think that clues, hints or the like are important. If the symbology of using spiderwebs as sling-shots with bones is a standard trope then I suppose maybe I'm just out of it - but I don't think it is. That isn't how spiderwebs work. It seems logically suspect even in the game's own context - if the scythe can't cut the web, why can't we use it to slingshot? Or if not getting the scythe stuck is critical, why do we need the scythe at all? Manny can just grip the bone.
It isn't bad as such; these puzzles can be solved and I enjoyed a bunch of these games with walkthroughs in hand. But it is easy to see why the market for point & clicks evaporated - the gameplay loop is weak and the puzzle aspect is also weak.
[0] And we can see what that became in the game here - https://youtu.be/jIoSL-uSwfs?t=4223
The only puzzle that stumped me was much later in the game, when a pneumatic tube demon asked me questions about Maximino where the answer was a number. I was so used to gleaning info from conversations or Manny’s quips that I didn’t realize the demon was using some bingo number picker or something in the background.
I suspect there is a hint in the name of the document. I can't tell how these "puzzles" are meant to be puzzles and to this day I never figured out how people were meant to solve them in the context of the game. The Discworld series as I recall were terrible for this, but these puzzle structure diagrams just don't make sense to me. What is the player being challenged to do? Grim Fandango is trying to tell a story but it won't reveal what the story is until after the player has already figured it out through telepathy and brute force clicking.
For all these games were landmarks it was an era where it wasn't obvious what a computer game could or should do to be interesting and entertaining. Something like Return of the Obra Dinn captures the intent of these games (storytelling through close inspection) much more cleanly.
As for your question about “what is the player being challenged to do?” I had to sit and think for a bit. I think the most straightforward answer is to just think abstractly and make connections in the context of a humorous noir story. You certainly aren’t being challenged to solve a mystery, but I’m not sure it really matters. I’m not sure if you mean it like Chess challenges you to vanquish your opponent and The Witness demands color/pattern/maze analysis.
Second of all, isn't it ungodly slow? I get that it can draw a few boxes nicely, and maybe shuffle them around, but I had to write my own engine using html canvas because d3 couldn't get svg to flow properly if I had thousands of pixels in my image.
Honestly, if you're going to go through the trouble of understanding d3, I would just write your own javascript canvas to animate things.