Exercise: Plunging into "Detritus"
In our first exercise with a prescribed game, we'll look at Detritus by Ben Jackson. It did exceedingly well at IF Comp 2025, taking out both the first place overall and the third place Miss Congeniality prize (as voted by IF Comp authors).
One way to do well at IF Comp is to make your game approachable for beginners and experts alike. Detritus does an exceptional job at onboarding players and managing difficulty. We want to explore these techniques of preserving agency whilst reducing the chance of player getting stuck. You can certainly reduce the chance of a player getting stuck if you railroad them, but how can we keep a good balance?
Exercise Objectives
Identify scenes of player onboarding.
Map out the hint system.
Observe how difficulty settings affects the narrative and mechanics.
Play tasks
Play Detritus once on the default difficulty. Log every moment where you felt lost, stuck or there was significant friction.
Replay at a different difficulty level and compare the friction points.
Identify player failure states and note which ones are recoverable and which ones aren't.
Post-play tasks
Writing exercise
Draft an opening to your own game that teaches mechanics without exposition.
Design exercise
Design a puzzle that can be solvable in two different ways. Try to aim for a puzzle that both solutions should feel natural, rather than an obvious solution and an obscure one.
Implementation exercise
Prototype a difficulty switch in an engine of your choice.
(Extension) Prototype a hints selection system that reacts differently on different challenge levels.