Hints

A puzzle that seemed obvious to you can stop a player completely. A hint system lets them get unstuck without looking up a full walkthrough, and without seeing the answers to puzzles they haven’t reached yet. This page shows you how to add one.

You want	Use
HINT to help with whatever the player is stuck on now, a little more each time	Hints for each stage
Hints that apply only in one room	Hints for a room
The player to pick which puzzle they want help with	A menu of hint questions

Quest Viva doesn’t have a HINT command built in, so you add your own. Core’s HELP command explains how to play in general, and only matches HELP or ? on its own, so a HINT command doesn’t clash with it.

Hints for each stage

Most games move through stages: first the player has to get through the door, then past the bugbear, and so on. The idea is to keep the hints for each stage in a list, and keep track of which stage the player is on. Each time the player types HINT, they get the next hint for that stage, starting vague and ending with the answer:

> hint
Hint 1 of 3: Have you looked carefully at everything in the room?

> hint
Hint 2 of 3: What might be under the mat?

> hint
Hint 3 of 3: LOOK UNDER MAT, then UNLOCK DOOR.

Setting up the hints

Put each stage’s hints on the object that the puzzle is about - the door, the bugbear - or on the room where it happens. On that object’s Attributes tab, add an attribute called “hints”, set its type to “String List”, and add the hints in order, from the gentlest nudge to the full answer.

Then tell the game which stage the player starts on. On the game’s Scripts tab, add this to the “Start script” - in the editor, use “Set a variable or attribute”, with game.hintstage on the left and door on the right:

game.hintstage = door

Moving to the next stage

When the player solves a puzzle, set game.hintstage to the next one, in the same script that solves it. For example, in the door’s “unlock” script:

msg ("You unlock the door.")
UnlockExit (door exit)
game.hintstage = bugbear

From then on, HINT gives the bugbear’s hints. That one line is all you need at each point where the game moves on. When there’s nothing left to give hints for, set game.hintstage = null.

If the order of your game isn’t fixed, set game.hintstage to whichever puzzle is most useful for the player to work on next - it’s just an attribute, so you can change it whenever you like.

The HINT command

Click “Add Command”, and in “Pattern” type hint;hints;clue. Give it this script:

SuppressTurnscripts
stage = GetAttribute(game, "hintstage")
if (stage = null) {
  msg ("There are no hints right now.")
}
else {
  total = ListCount(stage.hints)
  given = GetInt(stage, "hintsgiven")
  if (given < total) {
    given = given + 1
    stage.hintsgiven = given
  }
  msg ("Hint " + given + " of " + total + ": " + StringListItem(stage.hints, given - 1))
}

Here’s how it works:

• SuppressTurnscripts stops asking for a hint from counting as a turn, just like Core’s HELP - see Commands that shouldn’t take a turn.
• GetAttribute gets the current stage, or null if the game hasn’t set one, or has set it back to null.
• hintsgiven counts how many hints the player has seen for this stage. GetInt gives 0 if it hasn’t been set yet. It’s stored on the stage object, so each stage has its own count.
• StringListItem gets a hint from the list. The list starts at 0, so hint 1 is item 0.

Once the player has seen every hint for a stage, typing HINT again repeats the last one.

Tell the player that HINT exists - in the game’s introduction, for example - or they may never try it.

Hints for a room

Some puzzles belong to a room rather than to the main story - a side quest, or an optional treasure. You can give a room its own hints, which the player gets while they’re in that room, instead of the hints for the current stage.

Give the room a “hints” string list attribute, just like a stage. Then change the start of the HINT command so that it checks the player’s room first:

SuppressTurnscripts
if (HasAttribute(game.pov.parent, "hints")) {
  stage = game.pov.parent
}
else {
  stage = GetAttribute(game, "hintstage")
}

The rest of the script stays the same. game.pov.parent is the room the player is in.

When the player solves the room’s puzzle, remove the room’s hints, so that HINT goes back to helping with the main story:

garden.hints = null

Setting an attribute to null removes it, so HasAttribute is then false.

A menu of hint questions

Another approach, which you may know from Infocom’s InvisiClues booklets, is a list of questions the player might be asking. The player picks the one they’re stuck on, and sees only the answer to that. Use a string dictionary, where each key is a question and each value is its answer, and ShowMenu() to let the player choose.

1. Select “game” in the tree, and on its Attributes tab add an attribute called “hintmenu”. Set its type to “String dictionary”.
2. Add an entry for each question - for example “How do I open the door?” with the answer “The key is under the mat.”

Then add a command with the pattern hint;hints;clue:

SuppressTurnscripts
questions = NewStringList()
foreach (question, game.hintmenu) {
  list add (questions, question)
}
choice = ShowMenu("What do you need help with?", questions, true)
if (choice <> "") {
  msg (StringDictionaryItem(game.hintmenu, choice))
}

The foreach makes a list of the questions for the menu. The player sees them as numbered links, and can click one or type its number:

> hint
What do you need help with?
1: How do I open the door?
2: How do I get past the bugbear?

> 2
- How do I get past the bugbear?
Bugbears are allergic to jam.

The true lets the player back out of the menu by typing something else, in which case ShowMenu returns an empty string and nothing is shown.

The questions themselves can give things away - “How do I get past the bugbear?” tells the player there’s a bugbear. If that matters, only add a question to the dictionary once the player has reached that puzzle, using “Add a value to a dictionary” from the Variables category:

dictionary add (game.hintmenu, "How do I get past the bugbear?", "Bugbears are allergic to jam.")

Only add each question once - a dictionary can’t have the same key twice, so a script that could run more than once should check with DictionaryContains first.

Testing your hints

Play through your game, typing HINT at every stage, to check that each hint appears when it should. A misspelt object name in a game.hintstage line only causes an error when that line runs, so it’s easy to miss. A walkthrough that includes HINT at each stage catches this every time you run it.