Puzzle design

Characteristics of a bad puzzle

"Restore" puzzles

An unmarked door with deadly gas behind it that forces you to die with no chance of avoiding failure.

Arbitrary puzzles

Effects that are not diegetically linked to their causes; the artificiality of the game becomes impossible to ignore.

"Designer" puzzles

Puzzles whose solutions only make sense to you. You want to help the player beat the game, not show you're smarter than them.

Binary puzzles

"Yes" or "No" puzzles that instantly cause success or failure. The player will simply reload a save and progress with no involvement. Always give lots of choices and make sure the player understands their meaning.

Hunt the pixel puzzles

Self-explanatory.

Characteristics of a good puzzle

They are fair

• All the answers are in the game
• With enough prep and thought, it should be possible to complete the game on a first try. Don't withhold info.

Last point is especially important if the game presents a strong narrative component, you don't want to let your player see too much of the gamey structure behind your story. Disable saving and loading?

They're natural to the environment

If they're not arbitrary, then they must be deeply rooted in your setting and the people inhabiting it. Every puzzle needs to be somewhat tied to a time / place, but forcing the player to affect the NPCs, the world around them, the script is key to involving them in the broader story being told and making the world feel alive.

They amplify a theme

Consequence of the need of preserving your world's internal logic. Don't make an animal rights activist shoot a guard dog to get into a secluded building.

Handling Difficulty

How to modulate the difficulty of any given puzzle?

Difficulty slider

Often a choice to make at the beginning of a game, but enabling a hint system mid-playthrough counts as well.

• Have some puzzles already solved for you for less overall effort
• Simplified versions glossing over potential complications

Amount of bread crumbs

The directness of the information you're giving out to solve the puzzle.

Ex: when faced with a safe that's opened with an unknown combination, you could...

1. Have it written on the wall right next to it
2. Have it written under the rug
3. Have a picture somewhere, whose written date of taking is the combination (say 6/9/93)
4. Same as above, but with the addition of a note saying "Happy 50th anniversary" (you need to substract 50 years to the date)
5. Same as above, but it's in its owner's wallet in the trash somewhere
6. Same as above, but the owner is British, so you need to invert day and month

Proximity of puzzle to solution

Both geographically in the world and temporally in the playthrough.

Offering juicy reactions to an action (that don't play into any mechanical progress) can help fix an event or a piece of info in the player's mind for later.

Alternate solutions

• Expensive to implement, unless they follow the same idea (using either a sword, scissors, or a broken bottle to cut a rope)
• Might make the game too easy
• Might make the game prone to more bugs or exploits
• Heighten a sense of realism
• Often the standard in simulationist games, for obvious reasons

Steering the player

Slowly accompagnying the player towards the solution

Requires responses to player inputs that don't align with the intended solution and providing little or big clues. An ideal player progression involves them accumulating knowledge about the puzzle by trying things out until a critical mass of information is reached; that way, they don't feel like anything was handed to them.

Whether working with diegetic clues or a hint system, conditioning the appearance of decisive information to the previous appearance of more vague information is good practice.

Clues / hints can be static or they can depend on the current world state; they can also reveal only as much info as needed for the present puzzle (the room you're standing in).

Red herrings

Rarely needed since players tend to hard focus on their first idea anyway.

Parallel puzzles

Greatly shapes the player's experience, opportunity for the author to express their vision.

Allows the author to block the player's progression in a specific time and place, and force them to explore elsewhere for the time being.

The player may not even realize they were stuck in the first place, they might just decide to wander elsewhere until inspiration strikes, unaware they're missing an element crucial to the solution.

Fake puzzles

Deliberate dead-end that is shown as such to the player to stop them from pursuing similar solutions, or to steer them elsewhere.

Example

The player needs to drive in a nail. They are then presented with an obviously impossible puzzle that would allow them to get one. They could also obtain a hammer that would turn out to be made out of rubber, or one that will break against the nail, etc.

The game is communicating to the player that the idea of using a hammer on the nail isn't an oversight, but that proposing a different solution is deliberate.

Outer Wilds + DLC spoilers

The Echoes of the Eye does exactly this regarding the tablets and the final puzzle codes they originally contained.

1. You're presented with what looks like the final puzzle of the DLC, for which you need three codes (sequences of 6 abstract symbols).
2. You find out the codes have been lost due to the Stranger's dereliction; the tablets on which they were kept are severely degraded.
3. One of the slide reels you can find when exploring the Stranger shows that copies of the codes have been taken to the Simulation.
4. The first shrine you encounter starts to explain key plot points; it also immediately teaches you the first "glitch" you can perform to exploit the underlying rules of the Simulation (dropping your lantern against your better judgement and walking away from it, which reveals a low-res illuminated vision of what is otherwise a dark and stressful environment). You realize that in this state, you can now see invisible platforms disseminated in the world; one of which appears just around the corner and brings you to the first tablet copy... which is also degraded beyond reading?
5. A quick travel back to the final puzzle's grounds lets you use your newfound knowledge: switching to the low-res vision mode now lets you directly solve the first sub-puzzle, not by knowing the necessary code like expected, but by adjusting invisible platforms through your glitched sight.

To sum it up: the game explicitly gave you the mission to find three codes, but the tablets they were written on were unreadable. You were then guided to the Simulation to find their copies, only to be rebutted once again; but in the meantime, you were given new knowledge that made your understanding of the world evolve and made you understand that what's expected of you is not to follow the rules to be rewarded, but to learn to break the rules to get to your goals. After this sequence, you have a strong suspicion that the other simulated tablets are unreadable as well; instead, you're now trying to acquire a deeper understanding of the Simulation to master its glitches.

Note that, in conformity with the puzzle design principles presented on this page, Echoes of the Eye anchors its mystery in the discovery and the understanding of a coherent world, and through the emotional characterization of the Stranger's inhabitants through the abundant slide reels retracing their story.

Rewarding the player

(Progression in the game is always expected)(Particularly relevant to adventure games, no matter the form they take)

• Funny or surprising dialogue
• Unique animation
• Access to a new location / new locations
• Access to a new playable character
• Achievements
• Easter egg

Scope progression

Same principles as in linear art forms.

• The first puzzles establish characters, setting, a sense of where the story will go
• Aim to develop main characters to the max, make your protagonist relatable if they're more than an empty shell
• Make tension rise throught the game and reach a climax
• If longer game, divide this structure into acts that follow the same principles

Puzzle design process

1. Create setting
2. Populate with characters
3. Create the role of the player
4. Give the player a goal
5. Assign a sub-goal to each scene
6. Create obstacles to the player's progression, materialized through an puzzle
7. Make sure that in the end, the player has a solid grasp of what is part of the present puzzle and what is part of the game's natural boundaries

Variety

• Repeating a puzzle is a no-no, unless the second occurrence brings an additional layer of complexity to the table.
• Mixing localized actions and environmental states as combining factors for the resolution of a puzzle works like a charm in games featuring environmental / sequential puzzles such as Outer Wilds, Botany Manor, Grunn.
• In loop games, having several solutions to a puzzle might provide opportunities to keep early game elements relevant or change strategies depending on the player's level of knowledge, and augments the world's cohesiveness