What is a puzzle, and how do you make a good one?

What is a puzzle and how do you make a good puzzle?

Puzzles are a form of play which require a right answer to complete.

puzzles need to be fun for the player TO solve, not only fun WHEN solved.

puzzles can be combined with these genres: action, construction, story and competition.

Puzzles will often use words, images or logic, or even a combination of some of them.

It is important for puzzles to be easy to learn.

Keep the puzzle simple.

Let yourself be inspired by existing ideas.

Give hints to prevent frustration.

Add sounds graphics animations and story to make the puzzle more amusing.

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A puzzle is a game with a dominant strategy. This means that once you find an effective way of solving the puzzle, it will always work in the following attempts.

Puzzles are miniture games with one goal: finding the dominant strategy.

Puzzles are no longer being made explicit, instead they are being integrated into games.

10 Principles of Good Puzzle Design

1) Make the goal easily understood - people need to know what they're doing or they won't enjoy it.

2) Make it easy to get started - people should easily be able to manipulate the puzzle.

3) Give a sense of progress - players need to know when they're on the right track, let them see

4) Give it a sense of solvability - The players must be sure that the puzzle does in fact have a right answer.

5) Increase difficulty gradually - Puzzles are often solved by taking a series of actions. It is these actions that need to gradually become more difficult. Controlling the sequence in which the player can solve the puzzle lets you implement this gradual difficulty.

6) Parallelism lets the player rest - Multiple related puzzles as part of a big puzzle will let players try another part of the puzzle if they get stuck at some point.

7) Pyramid structure extends interest - smaller puzzles help in solving the larger puzzles within the whole puzzle.

8) Hints extend interest - Solving the puzzle with a hint is better than not solving it at all, because you gave up.

9) Give the answer - When the player is given the answer, it is satisfying after having given the puzzle some serious thought, even if you couldn't solve it yourself.

10) Perxeptual shifts are a double-edged sword - If the puzzle requires a big leap to gain any progress whatsoever, it could be very satisfying if you succeed or in some cases boring, because the players simply spent their time staring and then gave up.

Narrative and Puzzles in Games

Important Story Elements:

Protagonists

Conflict

Resolution of the Conflict

Moral

People are important to story, not objects. Objects may be important but only because they mean something to the people in the story. A good example of this is the ring of lord of the rings.

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Every story has conflict, sometimes direct, and sometimes indirect.

Direct conflict is between obvious "enemies" such as teachers and students, or two factions at war.

Indirect conflict is more subtle, such as humans and technology.

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Puzzles in Story

Puzzles are not a necessary part of the story, however they do work best when they move the story's narrative forward.

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Spacial Thinking

It is not important to get into too much detail when showing distance. The distances separating the important/interesting parts of the story can be simply cut out of the scene, to only show the interesting parts.

Level Design: A Simple Level

Game Level Design

When making a level you need the following:

Concept: general idea of how the game plays out

Environment to exist in: the "world" that contains the player

Beginning and Ending: how the game starts and ends (doh)

Goal: what player needs to achieve

A challenge to overcome to reach the goal: anything that makes the player put in any effort while playing(this is needed for player to have fun)

A reward: player gets something for reaching the goal, like a new level.

Way of handling failure: the action taken when player loses.

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The best gameplay mechanics require no explaination (like the way a door works, everyone knows it will open when used.)

It is important not to set players back and punish them hard for failing a challenge, You should simply let them try again.
Designers must not give players the opportunity to blame them for failure, because it would lead to players stopping to play.