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.