The Art of Puzzle Design | How Game Designers Explore Ideas and Themes with Puzzles and Problems

one of the first sequences of puzzles you encounter in the witness gets you to understand the principle of segregation you solve a sequence of increasingly complex puzzles all of which teach you to separate black and white tiles you add this knowledge to your conceptual lexicon and proceed to another area one which has puzzles that revolve around symmetry having to trace and navigate two lines simultaneously a third area in the desert at another rule the idea of reflection as you try to observe panels at the right angle so that the Sun reveals its solution these puzzles all exhibit the conventions of so-called good puzzle design there is a core mechanic implicit learning a steady escalation of complexity and even reprisals that are subverted for example this area's mechanic asks you to map a panel to a tree outside of it with the Apple designating the solution you travel through a sequence of these each with a twist until you reach the final tree and there is no Apple at all it's a subversion but the solution requires we break the assumption we have held us far a broken branch reveals its location and the reward more puzzles the brilliance of Jonathan blows design though is that he takes this conceptual language and maps it onto a theme what do segregation symmetry and reflection say about us a hidden audio log for segregation reveals it represents the divide between the subjective and objective ways of acquiring truth symmetry is tied to a Nicolas to Kooza quote where he talks about the parity between the heavens and the earth and the temple of reflections has a glyph that shows a ritualistic process by which the adherence mediated between their realm and the gods all these puzzles are tied to an overarching theme of the game that being the pursuit of truth and beauty and the divide between the subjective and the objective we now know of secret glyphs that reveal videos by scientists and artists all of whom speak to different ways to acquire truth none of which are universally true this is doubly fascinating because blows design philosophy for puzzles is exploratory in nature it is itself a process of finding the truth the themes of the game reflect the very process by which it was made which in turn exemplified the search for truth at the heart of puzzles I should be clear through the rhetorics of the witness there is no one process to acquire truth and similarly there is no one type of way to make a puzzle they can be strictly mechanical puzzles with no reference to theme or can be conjured for a specific purpose they can have one solution or like in the games of Zack tronics these systems that have multiple solutions to them engendering creativity we can also make puzzles that are meant to be immersive and embedded also we can have dynamic and non authored puzzles whether it be the emergent possibility space created by the random blocks of tetris or the abstract decision tree we navigate as we are engrossed in a game of chess turning the mind of another into a puzzle of its own this hasn't stopped people from trying to formalize what puzzles are in her GDC top solving puzzle design Jolie Menzel borrows Jessie Shell's definition of a puzzle and asserts that a puzzle is a game with a dominant solution that takes us through an emotional journey from uncertainty to competence others like Chris Crawford emphasize how puzzles are static unchanging and have no opponents where is a game is dynamic and shifts according to user interactivity like any good Wittgenstein Yin critic though attempts like these to formalize may be useful but they always end up being reductive excluding things we would otherwise call puzzles also attempts by game designers to formalize what puzzles are neglects how puzzles far predate video games computers are just the latest interface that is hosted them to understand what a puzzle can be we need to understand why it is we solve them to begin with in his book the puzzle instinct Marcel de neige see surveys the history of puzzles in our species and how they have expressed themselves for one puzzles have been used as ciphers to mediator understanding between the heavens and the earth whether it be through ruins divination or the i-ching puzzles have also inspired mathematicians to conjure new theories and thinkers like euler have conceptualized puzzles to solve mathematical conundrums like the Konigsberg bridge problem also mathematical treatises and books have all been framed as puzzles turning a science into an art aestheticizing a mode of inquiry speaking of which puzzles have also inspired literary works like Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland creating a fiction out of a puzzles many paradoxes and puzzles have also become a part of our daily rituals whether it be through crossword Sudoku or detective fiction puzzles have been used for religious artistic and scientific purposes all modes of inquiry into the question of what it means to be human so puzzles reveal the truth but they can also reveal the absurdity of such a claim riddles show us how limited our languages and visual illusions reveal the fal ability of our senses the famous liars paradox this sentence is a lie is an unresolvable paradox that speaks to mathematical concepts like girdle's incompleteness theorem puzzles help us seek the truth but also destabilize our apprehension off it they are intrinsically paradoxical Danai C provides a fascinating survey but also suggests that puzzles have the value of being paradoxical elegant non-obvious and meaningful they facilitate divergent thinking a flash of insight that elevates us to a new realm of understanding but in doing so they reveal new aesthetic properties of our thoughts for example this puzzle called a 9.4 puzzle requires you draw four straight lines through all dots without leaving the paper you start by trying out all permutations but you suddenly have a flash of insight and realize you need to break free of the implied box to solve the puzzle this puzzle has a meaning the meaning is thinking outside the box it's a puzzle about what a puzzle is puzzles are in some sense a flash of insight facilitated by thinking outside the box at a talk entitled impose omen delivered by Jonathan Blow Martin Bosch and roken the three discuss what they think the values of a puzzle ought to be below starts by asserting that he thinks that there is no distinction between the mechanics of a game and its dynamics and aesthetics the meaning is intrinsic in the fourth world of braid the mechanic is that your physical movement through space is tied to time this is explored in fascinating ways one puzzle requiring you to jump on an enemy that is moving backwards through time however blow ties this to the levels theme and characteristic fashion the level is called time and place it tells the story of how a physical space is tied to a temporal memory the theme is about how space and time are interconnected just like the mechanic in world 3 certain objects are immune to rewind and so blow explores the idea of how certain memories can never be forgotten next jokin talks about the importance of nonverbal communication something quite evident in his game star seed pilgrim a puzzler where you have to figure out all the rules for yourself this is a heuristic that is pervasive in puzzle design for example the game Stephen sausage roll is a grid-based Sokoban puzzle game where you have to cook both sides of his sausage on designated grills to complete levels the game teaches you the mechanics by constraining the possibility space later in the game when you have to learn how to skewer a sausage the game does this implicitly it constrains the possibility space so that you have to push against a tree showing you how to skewer using a solid background object it then guides you through a linear path with one exit showing you how to detach from it as well the rest of the level uses two other devices playgrounds and skill tests to get you to demonstrate your skills using play one of the most famous moments in the puzzle the important illustrates this well level 10 requires you to use a portal on a lower level to propel yourself across a gap to get the players to this insight though the designers have to constrain the possibility space the idea was embedded in the players head and the designers had to map what skills the player had at different points this requires the use of what some designers call a puzzle dependency chart a way to explicitly map what a player needs to know to solve puzzle mark 10 Bosch spoke next and he is creating a puzzle game called mega quarry that explores the question what if there are four spatial dimensions this is his contribution about the value of puzzles ask hypotheticals and explore the implications through design most puzzle games start with a what-if Raiders what if I could manipulate time fezzes what if I was a 2d being in a 3d universe and could shift between planes in fact each of these games was inspired by a book braid by Einsteins dreams and Fez by the story flatland showing how speculative fiction and science are important parts of generating ideas even artists can inspire puzzle ideas in conceptual language much like how the bizarre spatial geometry of MC Escher's work has inspired games like echo chrome Monument Valley and the upcoming game manifold garden all of which play with our spatial reasoning skills in different ways [Music] in any case what's fascinating here is that each of these speakers makes games in alignment with their purported values for what a puzzle should be whether it be thematic nonverbal or speculative although they do all agree with each other as well in another talk that just blow and ten Bosch gear called truth in puzzle design they set out a list of values and puzzle design richness completeness surprise lightest contrivance boundaries compatibility orthogonality generosity and emergence amongst them suggesting puzzles are oriented towards a higher calling truth they think puzzles are consistent systems like mathematical constructs that map on to hypotheticals in any number of universes the trick is to explore all the implications of a system like a mathematical superstructure one example they give on how to explore this is a puzzle in Portal 2 where you have to realize that if you collapse the light bridge you are on on to a lower plane by using a portal you can drop safely and traverse the space they also emphasized simplifying the space enough so that emergence can arise blow did this with the witness when he cut out lines that weren't straight it actually enhanced the possibility space again both think we are discovering things the universe is already conjured listening to the emergent patterns of puzzles as they reveal themselves values are abound in the design of puzzles which generates lists for what constitutes good and bad puzzle design Blow says puzzles don't necessarily have to be hard good or fun so long as they are interesting he also stresses the importance of exploratory design and not assuming the solution before you craft a puzzle some argue puzzles should be a linear progression allowing the deliberate management of a player's experience whereas others suggest nonlinear design enables player agency Julie Menzel says puzzles need to be rational show the goal and have clear information and feedback she also gives tips on how to modulate difficulty in puzzles by altering things like the steps it takes to solve another recent dichotomy in the value of puzzles is the dichotomy between puzzles and problems whether puzzle should have one solution or multiple in Bob Bates book on game design he argues that having multiple solutions to a puzzle cheapens it is very hard to design for and undermines the mean you can communicate it stands to reason that you can't control how a player experiences a game if they can conjure their own solution however if the games made by Zach Tronics infinifactory and space scam amongst them are anything to go by multiple solution problems are in fact becoming more popular they allow for more creative freedom and are also more a playable when asked how to create puzzles with multiple solutions Zach states that you do so naturally by creating a system this is perhaps why his puzzles are abstract simplifications of real-world problems whether engineering or programming which allows him to naturally encode multiple solutions other Studios like the team who made zelda breath of the wild deliberately generate puzzles and scenarios that have multiple solutions to them to ensure that there is a creative possibility space they also made sure to connect everything in the world something Zach Tronics games also employed in any case - Zach this type of design is more natural and comes easier however it is also true that the experience for multiple solution problems does vary the takeaway again though is much like puzzles themselves there is no one way to design them which requires we be flexible whenever we assert an intrinsic set of values for the creation of puzzles aside from his skepticism about problems Bob baits work on puzzle design is an absolutely essential read he created a taxonomy of all types of puzzles he could find including divergent puzzles building puzzles information puzzles codes but also logical forms he then gives a list of bad practices that might seem obvious but are often ignored don't create binary yes/no puzzles don't create hunt the pixel puzzles don't presume information outside the game when solving them and don't create a massive logical or spatial and coherence between puzzles something old adventure games did the needless effect another interesting point he makes is that functionally all puzzles are fundamentally alignment problems an order of operations problem in either space or time Tetris is an alignment puzzle in space you have to clear entire lines where is the game like the Tallis principle requires you do a sequence of actions in a specific order in terms of positive values for puzzles he states we should have a clear goal the puzzle should be about how to do something not what to do and they should also be fair embedded in the environment and thematic overlapping with the insights of other designers again I stressed though heuristics for good puzzle design are just that guidelines that aren't necessarily what is true or false right or wrong blow suggests you should never work backwards when designing a puzzle but that is exactly what our Vita Kari did when he created his game Bubba is you Bubba is you takes the idea of subverting rules to a deeper level in the game you can change the rules of the play space by manipulating blocks that encode simple logic for example one level has what seems like an impassable lava stream so instead of trying to cross it you can shift a block to change the properties of the lava to make it possible another level requires you to change a rule that is out of reach so we use a sequence of rocks to dislodge the existing rule allowing you to progress the layers of depth the designer pushes the idea to our astonishing creating a cascading array of rules you have to manage to solve puzzles the idea of examining this idea in an exploratory way may seem daunting that is exactly what the designer initially did he tried simple combinations of rules and conjured up fascinating sequences however he then reverse engineered levels to fit these novel phenomena leveraging forward thinking but also backwards oriented design the possibility space here was perhaps too dense to just keep accumulating procedures so going against blows philosophy and working backwards from a solution is what worked here instead the game gets ridiculously complex by the end it has metal levels that are built by using blocks called level which allows you to change the properties of the level itself at the menu screen you can even win the menu screen by creating a Bubba and a flag the puzzles now become about managing rules at multiple resolutions as he coordinated hierarchy of rules and embedded worlds in contrast to his previous subversion of blows philosophy this aligns with the value of exploring the richest possibility space of taking an idea expanding it as far as you can take it this always requires periodic conceptual leaves to sustain them braid starts with rewinding time but then objects immune to time are introduced mechanic where space is time and then the ability to create doppelgangers is presented all of which are there to escalate the conceptual space Stephen sausage rule starts with simple grid based movement but then you can attach to objects or release your skewer English country tune also starts as a Sokoban style puzzle game but then eventually requires you to use an editor to build a puzzle levels that will eventually allow you to solve them turning you from puzzle solver to puzzle creator the witness may start on panels but you then realize there are puzzles that refer to and incorporate the outside world and then puzzles that break free of the constraints of the panel's themselves in his GDC talk hearts and minds Frank Lantz argues that games make thought visible to itself they are an art form that reveal the inner workings of our mind as designers we have to think about thinking not just ours but those of our players a puzzle in some sense is an even purer form of this one that strips away any extraneous details and is fixated solely on walking us towards enlightenment in some sense puzzles are the art of thought itself thought instrumentalized towards insight like we examined earlier puzzles contain their own contradictions there is much an exploration of truth as they are deconstruction of it this is why many puzzle games seem to build into their narratives a subversive rhetoric famously portal is a game that seems benign on the surface you are participating in a series of tests in order to be rewarded with k-kat obstacles end of course as glados's steady deterioration makes quite apparent not everything is as it seems you have to break free of the linear path presented to you and emancipate yourself from her tyrannical control and perhaps the designers as well GLaDOS is as accurate a portrayal of a designer in the fiction of a game as there might ever be she is editing our experiences as a designer does portal appreciates its own puzzle nests and builds a fiction around it puzzles communicate their own meanings it's up to us to appreciate this and reflect it in the game's fiction presented with a conundrum humans seem incapable of placating their curiosity and we see this in the communities that build around games the Dark Souls lore community are obsessed with the games world and stop at nothing to piece together every little detail they can scrounge this is a community-wide effort to uncover some truth but it is ultimately a truth conjured by other humans what's fascinating with games is that we can meet the gods of these new universes and can be somewhat assured that there must be some purpose in the game Fez there was a practically unsolvable puzzle called the black monolith that had a community of puzzle solvers obsess over it some believe the solution was somehow related to a strange poem about the creation of the universe which could be deciphered through some careful translations of a mysterious tome found elsewhere some thought it might have to do with a clue elsewhere in the game they might have missed I'll spare you the details but what ended up happening is the community brute forced the solution however they ended up with a solution to a question they did not know the meaning of a puzzle is not in the solution it seems to be in how we go about solving the question that is posed to us puzzles emerged at roughly the same time mysticism emerged but they were also fueled by revolutions in scientific and mathematical thought in some sense puzzles are a reification of our thoughts there are an aesthetic manifestation of something that would otherwise remain intangible Jonathan Blow might have caught wind of this when he designed the witness you solve puzzles throughout the island moving up a chain of abstraction that sees you assemble a language of terrifying complexity you activate beams after solving sequences of them all of which point to a destination the top of a mountain enlightenment beckons you think to yourself these puzzles are guiding me towards my own apotheosis the mountain and its mysteries lead you to a cage a cage which seems positively divine except it takes you right back to where you started the puzzles were a false prophet they led you astray there was no truth to be found only a reminder of the fal ability of obsessing over puzzles themselves however what if the truth you were seeking was right in front of you all along the witness strives for Concilium it wants to bridge the divide between the arts and the sciences between the rational and the emotional the materialistic and the aesthetic fortunately this seems to be what puzzles are inherently about the very search for truth the thesis of Denise's book is that puzzles cannot be subject to any singular definition they resist being solved by their very nature they are autological the word puzzle describes itself the real world has calculus to peer into its mysteries and the digital world has programming to make manifest our will but puzzles are the domain of human thought itself they reveal the mysteries that lie within but also out there in the universe this is a paradox but paradoxes like puzzles themselves reveal the limits of human reason TS Eliot said that true knowledge starts with comprehending the forces that make us us about understanding ourselves a puzzle is a looking glass through which to view ourselves and what we see is an instinct to solve the very thing through which it is seen you

Channel: The Game Overanalyser

Views: 14,593

Rating: 4.9117646 out of 5

Keywords: the secrets of puzzle design, puzzle design, puzzles or problems, what makes a good puzzle, Game design puzzles, solving puzzle design, puzzles versus problems, how game designers explore ideas and emotions with puzzles and problems, gaming, the game overanalyser, honest puzzle design, how jonathan blow designs a puzzle, the witness analysis, braid analysis, portal analysis, baba is you analysis, stephens sausage roll, manifold garden analysis, games

Id: hCOHjTX4GYE

Length: 21min 16sec (1276 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 24 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/JueJueBean]

Puzzles are my design weakness. Id rather not puzzle at all than present a sub-par exp.

[u/iakosv]

That was way more interesting than I thought it would be, albeit very theoretical rather than practical. It's certainly given me something to think about. I've been playing around with the idea of a game that helps you learn a language and thought doing so through puzzles might be the best option as essentially language works but having certain pieces that fit together in order to convey certain meanings - very puzzle-like.