An Independent Game Developer’s Diary

I’ve just come back from watching the new Indiana Jones movie, and while enjoyable, I had to turn off my brain while watching (obviously unsuccessfully) as many of the traps, secret passages and so forth were clearly designed with the movie in mind, not any form of realism.

In some cases this is a good thing, in some games, realism is exactly what is not required, a good fantasy yarn should allow you to cleave through a goblins skull, kick an orc down some steps and swing on a chandelier without needing you to stop and think, is it realistic that I could do this?

But when it comes to dungeon, adventure or trap design, sometimes realism is necessary. You don’t want the player to be thinking, How did this get here, and why does it work. In many games, the players feel like they are the center of the world, which may be true, but it can break the illusion. A dungeon which has been abandoned for centuries, contains a host of different monsters, and has a hidden entrance that is guarded by a deadly trap, might make your players stop and think. How did these monsters get here? What do they eat? Why don’t they eat one another, and how did they get past that trap?

When writing a dungeon, always thing about it’s intended use, and it’s current use. A trapped tomb, that the builders put the pharoh into, and then set all the traps as they leave would be fully trapped, with no way of getting past the traps because nobody was expected to go back inside. But the busy entrance to a network of goblin caves probably wont have an unpassable trap.

Also think about intended usages of your dungeon features. In Indiana Jones, the entrance to a major set of rooms involved a large stone pyramidal structure with a column in the center. The column was held up by sand, which when some stones were removed, emptied from under the monolith, allowing the gigantic stone monilith to drop, presumably triggering a counterweight which caused the area they stood upon to collapse. They land on a staircase which starts to recede into the wall.
This made for an exciting pair of scenes, a scene of discovery (finding the feature which allows the dungeon to be entered), and a “chase” scene, the protagonists being chased by the specter of the lack of a stairway.

But I wondered how the natives would reset the entrance. I mean they would have to lift up a multi-ton monolith, and then put the sand back in, so it is supported. They also need to re-extend the staircase.
And what is the deal with that staircase. The creators presumably didn’t want to open the “door” and then have to run down the staircase as quick as possible to avoid falling, so how did they use it day to day?
In the film, an explorer is supposed to have been here before, some 500 years previous, got through a door that is only passable with a magic dongle, stolen the magic dongle, and got out. I presume that this explorer didn’t bother to reset the trap, and the local natives didn’t seem to possess the intelligence necessary to do so.

Don’t let thoughts like this ruin your dungeon or adventure. If you are writing a game that is supposed to be movie like, then these concerns don’t need to bother you. But if you have thinking players, then ensure that your traps and dungeons have some thought to them.