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[vinheim3]

For those of you who are developing or have developed a puzzle game, (and I'm talking more the ones that have a core mechanic which is gradually built upon like Chip's Challenge over simple arcadey type games like Tetris), how have you decided objects or mechanics to increase your game's puzzle potential?

Often when I play puzzle games, I look back at a completed puzzle and it turns from mind-numbing to trivial. I've always wondered how do devs gauge the difficulty of their puzzles when they know how each work, especially for those games that have a nice gradual difficulty curve or a very consistent difficult difficulty curve. When I look at my core idea, I find it difficult to add new mechanics or decide the right objects because when developing the puzzle, I already know the solution and it's made trivial to me.

I know playtesting is a possible option, but then you would have had to already have your mechanics in place, mechanics that may not be good, and puzzle games are often very split between different people, with 1 person finding 1 puzzle hard and the other simple, and another person the opposite.

[Paul Jeffries]

I developed a physics-based puzzle game a while ago and the approach that I took there, which worked quite well, was to only add a new feature or mechanic once I'd finished creating levels that fully exhausted all the possibilities of the existing object-set without repeating anything.  Once I'd finished building those levels and playtesting them, I then had a pretty good idea of what mechanic to add next to complement what was there, I then built a bunch of levels utilising that mechanic which I interwove with the ones I'd already created and so on until I considered the game was big enough to call finished.

What I found by doing that was that my own process of exploring the possibilities of the mechanics mirrored the similar process which the player would go through and resulted in a level set that introduced new features at a manageable pace.  I also found that I needed far fewer elements than I originally thought I would - I had plenty of ideas that I didn't implement because they turned out not to really be necessary and indeed probably would have detracted from the experience.  So, I advise not trying to plan everything out from the start - you'll probably end up with too many elements which you are not using to their full potential and that do not necessarily complement one another.  Get the simplest possible version of the game you can think of working and then iterate on that design, gradually adding new mechanics.

[SpaceHaddock]

Three main points come to mind for me.

1. Introduce elements one at a time and force the players to learn the basics of them. If the player has never seen a key and door before then make an extremely simple level (or part of a level) where the player is trapped with no way to progress besides using the key. Once you've done that you can continue to introduce the deeper mechanics of the key alongside other elements as well (though still only one mechanic at a time as a general rule).

2. Optional difficulty can be used to allow for degrees of success. In Portal for instance there is a challenge to complete a level with as few portals as possible which can award different medals. In this way players can play through the level understanding iteratively how to reduce the number of portals needed. If they can't figure the gold solution out though they can take their bronze and move on happily. Braid also used this with puzzle pieces that offered additional challenge on each level. Though necessary for the "true" ending the pieces could be skipped for the majority of the game and if you couldn't figure out how to get them you could move on.

3. It doesn't have to be hard. People like the puzzles in Zelda but those mostly come down to finding the pieces to use and then putting them together. Shoot the gem with the arrow, use the bomb on the wall, hit the button with the boomerang, etc. These aren't exactly hard but they're still enjoyable for people. If we design so that we ourselves are challenged then the average player will have their mind melted because they don't have the intimate knowledge of the game that we do.

Playtesting is pretty important though and it should come at practically every step.