This page contains ideas for puzzles to be used in the game.

Brainteasing Puzzles

Fix The Logic Circuit

Premise: certain door locks are made out of logic circuits (AND, OR, NOT, ...) and connecting wires. The door is unlocked when one (or more) output pins have have a 1 input. Notably, not all circuits should be part of the results or all possible connections be there. Now, when the player encounters such a lock, one of the logic components should be "blown out" or so, and the task is to use the other components to rewire the whole thing to get the right output.

Example - say, the player sees the following board:

                     +-----+
SWITCH   ----------o-| AND |
           +-----+   |     |   +----+
SEC_LCKD --| NOT |---|     |-o-| OR |
           +-----+   +-----+   |    |
SEC_EVAC ----------------------|    |---- OPEN
                               +----+

'o' denote points were "wires" can be connected.

OPEN has to become 1. Input SWITCH is 1, SEC_* is 0. The "AND" is blown out, ie it's output is always 0. The solution here would be to "rewire" the SWITCH to bypass the AND and go directly into the OR, allowing OPEN to become 1. (With more or other 'connection points' other solutions are valid as well.)

Alternations:

• More difficulty by "blowing out" more components and restricting what can be rewired.
• No rewiring, but swapping out components. Thus can also serve as a "crack the door" puzzle.
• The circuit can only be solved when a special component is used that has to be found separately.
• Find some logic bricks (AND, OR, NOT, XOR, ...) in a storeroom or so that have to be used somewhere to replace broken logic bricks. The puzzle here is to find the right brick(s).
• On the example you notice multiple inputs. A game event could change an input for a number of locks so they basically have to be re-solved. (Might frustate player if overdone.)
• Don't label the bricks AND, OR but use some other symbols (so some figuring out is needed).
• To make this puzzle interesting every time the play is started again, we should either make sure we have sufficient logic circuits to select from when the game starts or else have a way to generate these puzzles (might be complicated).

Drawback:

• Care must be taken so having studied computer science or electronics is not a requirement to solve these puzzles.
• They're not really easy to design either (I needed a while to come up with that example; OTOH, I'm rusty on that stuff).

The MasterMind Lock

Not every puzzle has to be invented from scratch ;) For a "locked door", maybe make the puzzle a game of master mind (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastermind_(board_game) ). The door is the codemaker, and the player is the codebreaker.

Sudoku Lock

You get a sudoku and four indicated empty areas on the sudoku must be solved in order to have a secret code to open the door.

Action-based/physics puzzles

Blow Up Stuff

It's an FPS, you should blow up something at some point ;)

Things to consider:

• What to Blow Up? That could be an obstacle or an enemy.
• How? Obviously, directly through the blast. More interesting: physics, the blast propels something which does the actual damaging impact.
• What is Blowing Up? Explosive crates or barrels are not only clicheed but they don't make sense in the surroundings: a colony ship with proper workplace safety rules in effect would probably not have explosive things standing around on walkways. (Special purpose areas, however, might.)
  

So what blows should be something that fits naturally into the environment:

• • On a crash-landed space ship that could be a broken pipe.
  • On the medical station this could be oxygen bottles.
• Giving cues: any exploding thing should hint at that fact. The pipe could emit some ominous steam/flamelets. Or, at some earlier point in the progression, the player sees (in a scripted event) the exploding thing explode.

Alternations:

• You have to pick up an item, carry it to the right place and blow it up there.
  • A hint that that item is explosive is still needed.
  • The player shouldn't get stuck when blowing the item in the wrong place; ie more items of that kind should easily be obtainable. (To pick up Elian's oxygen bottle: there could be a dispenser for these that gives them out ad infinitum.)
• Alternation on the previous alternationn: the player has to find multiple items and combine these to obtain an explosive.