If you don’t believe me, take a look at the simpler, non in-depth explanation of how to find the Y-pipe in the game: This made writing a guide much, much more difficult.
The second Pajama Sam game is just like the first, except much bigger, with more complicated possible game outcomes. Pajama Sam 2: Thunder and Lightning Aren’t So Frightening I worried that someone would call me out on writing a guide on how to beat part of the game I never played, but no one ever did. I ended up copy/pasting the instructions on what to do from the game’s help file for that particular game outcome. I restarted the game about twenty times, but I always got the scenario where the mask was on the carrot. Mini-confession: No matter how many times I restarted the game, I never got the scenario where the mask was underneath the dancing furniture. So as an additional solution to the problem, I made a quick list of every item in the game, and where they can be found, all of which was quite straightforward and made the guide seem less confusing. I ended up with a LOT of sentences like “If so-and-so is here, do such-and-such, but if it’s not here, then it’s la-de-da, which means you’ll do do-re-mi instead.” About one third of the guide is me listing out the possible game outcomes and alternative outcomes, which involves a lot of needless repetition and makes things sound way more complicated than they actually are. The solution? I had to play the game over and over again, until I saw every single possible outcome, and then I listed all of them in my guide. How can I write a guide telling the player what to do when the items switch places randomly? After all, I can’t tell people how to get the lunchbox if sometimes it’s underwater and sometimes it’s by the well. Now, this “random item placement” scenario makes for great replayability, but it is pure torture for guide writers. That way, you can replay each game a couple of times, and it will be different each time. Each game involves Pajama Sam finding three or more missing items, which are randomly placed throughout the game.
#Pajama sam 1 series#
Pajama Sam: No Need to Hide When It’s Dark Outsideįor those of you who don’t know, the Pajama Sam series are games for 6-to-11 year olds that follow the adventures of child superhero-to-be, Pajama Sam. This month, in a surprisingly informative column, I’m going to go through the Pajama Sam series, and explain the various complications the games pose for the average guide writer. So it looks like I’ll be sticking with “Inside the Guide” for a while longer. Or, as I like to call it, “The Greatest Column GameCola Runs, Next to the Other Column I Write.” I asked the editors if I could make that the new name of this column, but they said that’d cause troubles with the GameCola archives. Hello everyone, and welcome to “Inside the Guide,” the only article on GameCola that discusses writing guides for videogames.
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