#Puzzle Design

[fishfingersandscarves]

first night of chanukah tonight so please enjoy this rejected puzzle design ✌️

[braininatankwithalaptop]

As excited as I am for a Zelda game with her as the protagonist, I do have some concerns with the mechanics.

The core heart and beating soul of good puzzles and puzzle design (imo) is limitations. You have to maneuver through the maze in (x) number of steps. You can only use the torch three times to light five lanterns. You can only weigh the 8 pills 3 times to find the poisonous one. And looking at the gameplay we've seen in the trailer, I don't get any sense that there are limitations? Boxes and decorative trees are used in a cave system far away from the (presumed) town you first unlocked them. There is no sign of limitation of number of echoes you can store. My biggest concern with this is that with the high focus on options, it will kill opportunities to design good puzzles. I wasn't as much of a fan of TOTK puzzles because they were relatively easy to cheese. You see those videos of players permastunning lynel's by recreating rings made of unbreakable material around them? I don't want a whole puzzle game that has the same weakness in it's design. Just thinking about the game from a design perspective I can think of two things that would give me hope. 1) There is a limit of echos you can have out in the world at the same time 2) There is a limit to the number of echos you have stored in the tri-rod (this would be my preferred solution, as if you had all items ever recorded, it would be super annoying to scroll through in the method demonstrated in the trailer) 3) Some combination of the above two. These obviously aren't the only solutions, but they're the most obvious ones that come to mind. If there aren't any limitations to the echo power, I won't completely give up hope, but I'm going to be very skeptical until I hear of puzzles that are still able to be interesting/engaging with that freedom.

[ngeruma]

"Puzzle Constructor" | Perpetual Testing | Portal 2 Community Maps & Mods

By jp

It’s about time I took a crash course in Portal puzzle making.

This is the 400th episode of Perpetual Testing!

Full Video

More Test Chambers

[sealbatross]

we couldn't find an eeveelution themed puzzle that suited our taste so i decided to make one, excited to see how it turns out!

[pisoprano]

If I had to pick an Age of the Myst series that was my favorite, I think it’d have to be Amateria. There might be some bias in that it was the first Age I remember solving myself instead of getting help from a family member who’d already solved it, but truly there is something so special about the the puzzle environment here.

(Spoilers ahead)

Amateria is based around three puzzles that each feature an ice sphere being guided along various tracks through the puzzle's architecture.

One of the puzzles allows the player to interact directly with the track the ice sphere travels along. Here, you follow the sphere through intersecting loops and vibrating walls of air (which are very disorienting to stand inside, as it makes the screen shake) that can be turned off during a phase of the sequence dictated by the player. In order to test the puzzle, however, the player must access a panel that propels you upwards to a place where you are able to watch your programming unfold in a more third-person view all at once. If you do it right, each of the five vibrating rings will turn off one by one in the proper sequence. If not, the test sphere hits the vibrating wall and shatters, meaning you have to go back down to try again (fortunately, there seems to be an infinite number of ice spheres you can create until you get it right).

The lever puzzle is a bit different in that you don't get to interact with the track directly this time. Instead, you either get to look at the lever from the side (where you can pull switches to move the wheel that acts as the lever’s fulcrum) or you go to the secluded alcoves where the counterweight spheres are located (so you can adjust and/or evaluate the counterweight wood, metal, and glass sections of their respective spheres and get them to balance). The clues to understanding the puzzle are found back on the hub age, though if you’re inclined to guessing and checking to solve this puzzle, you can do it (though you will end up crashing a LOT of ice spheres off the lever trying).

The third puzzle is almost completely abstracted, being a series of interconnected rings spinning over the sea where you can’t reach. Some of these rings have a solid bottom, while others are completely hollow (meaning that any spheres that get sent there crash straight into the water), and you have to discover a path that bounces the sphere to only places it can be held (and, just to make your life more difficult, one of the spots for pegs have had another peg stuffed in the hole, making the spot unusable).

After each of the three puzzles are solved, the player is given a passcode. Entering each passcode into a series of displays at the starting location allows them access to the inside of the main pagoda, where they’ll find several interlocking tracks and the rising platform leads to the most abstracted puzzle yet: a series of wooden circles with lines carved into the design that you have to make match up with a few colored icons around the edge.

Once this puzzle’s pieces are all place, control is taken away from the player as something lowers above you. You press a button (you have no idea what it does, but you’ve gotten this far by trying things and seeing what happens) and the puzzle interface pulls out of reach. You hear the familiar sound of a sphere being created, but this time it occurs as an ice sphere comes into existence around you. You hang there hovering in the air just long enough for it to sink in that you are about to take the place of all those spheres you’ve thrown away solving puzzles.

Then you drop and get sent on that ride.

You travel the intersecting loops and you don’t hit any of the vibrating barriers, despite how you slow and speed up as you go up and down the track. You start to relax a little as you go through a tunnel, only to turn and see the wood-glass counterweight go into motion and you realize that that lever needs to move into place exactly and before you can even react, you straight at the end of the lever, it just barely getting into place when you slide into its curved groove. You then get sent out to sea and experience being bounced from ring to ring, hoping very hard that you programmed the puzzle correctly, because you can’t see which of the rings have bottoms and which are hollow and would lead you to your certain doom. But you survive and you keep going and you move towards a series of gaps that you barely recognize, where—1, 2, 3—a platform for each puzzle you solved rises out of the sea just in time to carry you across to a place where the ice sphere finally comes to rest, now shattering around you. You made it through alive.

This Age does an amazing job of leading you towards abstraction, always giving you the view of the whole puzzle from a third-person observer to the point that it almost feels like you’re not in a physical place anymore, that the puzzles are disconnected and arbitrar, and that the ice spheres that shatter during your trial and error are just there for player feedback. If you want a sense of place, you’ll see it in the glowing crystals and stone pillars and wooden architecture—not the puzzles themselves.

And all of that changes the second that you become the sphere on the interconnected track that this whole world has been built around.

[visserdaniellebpw]

New updates on the level design!

I added some weird magic elements.

#projectfortuna

[michaelrotonal]

Puzzle Making Challenge:

Make a puzzle with exactly 2 solutions (has to be exact), and make them as different as you can.

Difference is measured as the number of basic puzzle elements that are different between the two solutions, divided by how many there are

List of Basic Puzzle Elements for various Puzzle Styles

Sudoku: digit

Jigsaw Puzzle: piece

Nonomino: uh... idk, whether a square is black or white?

Cryptic crossword clue: yeah i don't think you can measure difference here

[nothingtodowiththatpartridge]

Puzzling it out: Exploring Escape Games for Learning and Assessment. Telfest 2018

[ciltilladeltilla]

[fishfingersandscarves]

first official day and second night of chanukah tonight so here's the other rejected puzzle design i made <3

[cryptic-paw]

Puzzle Post Part 1: The River Problem

You have to get a fox, a bag of grain, and a chicken over to the other side of a river. However, your raft can only hold one passenger at a time. If you leave the fox alone with the chicken, it will eat it. If you leave the grain alone with the chicken, it will also be eaten. How do you safely transport all three to the other side?

[futureproof404]

lets go filing cabinet !

[axi35]

Jigsaw Puzzle

https://www.redbubble.com/i/jigsaw-puzzle/Fantasy-Forest-by-Axi35/143416484.NWQ40?asc=u

[ngeruma]

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"Claustrophobia Christmas Madness" | Perpetual Testing #272 By Stuntmanmyke

OK so the title may have implied more festive theming than we actually get, in fact a lot more, but I thought it would be interesting to have a look at what kind of puzzle you can get in such a compact, 27 puzzle maker block sized chamber. It turns out, a kind of weird one that maybe breaks a few rules.

Full Video

More Test Chambers

[prokopetz]

Today's aesthetic: video games with innovative puzzle-solving mechanics where the developers ran out of ideas for what to do with those mechanics about two-thirds of the way through, so the final challenge is, like, a stealth section or something.