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Leaving bad puzzles behind - Two golden rules of design

There's this great article where the writer interviews top puzzle game developers and has them articulate what makes a good puzzle. Based on their collective advice, I've created two golden rules of great puzzle design. Every puzzle in the game follows the rules, or is left behind.

1) When the solution is known, the puzzle is solved

This sounds like total common sense, but is the biggest cause of bad puzzle in indies and professionals alike.

To help figure out why this isn't always the case, we'll dive into the worst puzzle in the game.



At this point it's been established to the player that moving a black rock onto the off-colored tile will open the nearby gate. The puzzle? The gate blocking the way forward has two tiles, but the player has only one rock.

But don't worry. We're clever. We use the one rock to unlock the top gate, gaining access to our second rock, then we move both onto the bottom tiles and unlock our gate. Good. We figured out the solution in like 10 seconds, but the puzzle is far from solved. There's about a minute of busy work to shuffle the rocks into place.

Another way of wording rule one:
Discovering the solution should take significantly more time than executing it.



Here's a better puzzle designed with the two rules in mind.

How do you get these two rocks unstuck? No idea. But once you figure out, they're basically right where they need to be. Bonus points because the solution to this puzzles involves showing an understanding of a previously learned, but untested mechanic, which is exactly what rule two is about.

2) Each puzzle teaches something new

Whether that means the player is learning a mechanic for the first time, discovering new ways existing mechanics interact with the world, or showing a new level of mastery over a previous skill.

An alternative wording:
Every puzzle of the same type has a different solution.



In this series of puzzles, the player has learned the green vines will wither and die if an undead comes near them.

The first puzzle is clearing the southern vines to open the path further into the dungeon. To solve it, the player discovers that the zombie can be interacted with and controlled by the necromancer party member.

The next challenge is guiding the zombie near the vine wrapped chest on the right. Unfortunately, our zombie is rather dumb and moves in a straight line until hitting an obstacle (sliding ice puzzle style). Here we learn how to turn our zombie with precision using the movable rock to create an impeccably placed wall.

The last puzzle is the chest on the left. How do we get the zombie across the gap? Who knows. But it probably involves learning something not used in the previous puzzles.

Leaving bad puzzles behind

These two rules guide every puzzle put into the game. The few earliest puzzles that predate the rules have been reworked to follow them.

To quote a play tester, "I guess the newer puzzles are slightly improved."

Posts

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OzzyTheOne
Future Ruler of Gam Mak
4676
I find this to be an interesting and informative enough little blog to help me think about puzzle desing myself. Thanks to you, I was able to realize that I have much to learn when it comes to puzzle design and after reading the article that you were so kind to link, I think I learned some valuable things. Thanks for sharing this with us. I'll make sure to give this a play and keep an eye out on the puzzle design.
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