puzzle making tips?

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PhoenixBlaze
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puzzle making tips?

Post by PhoenixBlaze » Sun Apr 04, 2021 8:55 pm

i'm not good at solving puzzles, and i recently discovered i'm not good at making them, either. i know there are a lot of people here who are good at making puzzles- could i have some tips? i want to make puzzles that don't really depend on fast fingers, i want puzzles that make you think.
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Muzozavr
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Re: puzzle making tips?

Post by Muzozavr » Sun Apr 04, 2021 11:16 pm

Well, me replying might be silly because I mostly did stuff in RTW and very few levels in WA, plus I haven't made anything for a long time now... but I feel like I can answer this more generally. :wink: Although it has a lot to do with what I think is a good puzzle, so different creators might have different approaches and design philosophies.

First, the better you are at solving, the better you'll be at creating, but it's not entirely *necessary* to be a good solver to make good stuff. So don't be disheartened, but do play more. :lol:

Second, unless you've got a very special concept in mind (a glitch-based trick level, surrealism a-la The End, or intentional unfairness a-la Wondertrolls), be fair. I sometimes violated this in the past because I was stupid at the time, but no one needs fake wall passages used to trick people. Secrets are OK for bonuses, but no one wants to try and solve a puzzle only to realize the "puzzle" was just a bunch of hidden information they had no way of finding out.

(I did violate this rule intentionally at times in RTW when it comes to glitch abuse and other such things, but there's a reason I eventually made a second account for those RTW levels...)

Third, minimize clutter. This also means that your red herrings (if any) have to be as thought out as the actual solution -- don't just throw in extra items. If clutter is minimized, everything feels more elegant in the end.

As for difficulty... I usually try to come up with some sort of a trick. An old one will do if you can't come up with a new one, but a new one is always more interesting. A "trick" here is some unusual concept that you want to try and enforce: "what is the strangest, least obvious thing I can make people do that isn't a glitch?" In RTW, "use the same reflector twice for the same cannon shot by pushing it into a teleport" would be an example of such an unobvious tactic.

CMD4 allows far too many insane shenanigans and you're likely to just get overwhelmed by those possibilities, so try to stay within vanilla boundaries for now. Start exploring what WA's elements can do that isn't immediately obvious. Off the top of my head:

... how about a level where you have to let a spellball fly through a series of gates, setting up a flo/blink combination to open each gate in turn for the spellball to fly through? (Note: I've made something similar)

... how about a level where you have a lonely gem or coin and you need to flash it across a series of islands to block the movement of a monster or a scritter? ... how about it's a key and you then have to flash it back in order to collect it?

... how about having a scritter at the end of a line of barrels, which you pow and then you shoot brr as soon as the way is clear right before the scritter explodes, so that you freeze the scritter first and then it lives to be useful elsewhere?

... how about several flo bubbles with several pops used to pre-target certain transporters, then you move inside the transporter puzzle and you have to time your move with your own pre-placed pops?

... how about an ice puzzle where you have a wee stinker (or several) and you have to freeze them to make temporary stopping points?

Etc, etc, the more you think, the more interesting ideas you'll find. If nothing else helps, try re-playing levels from the official games and try to break them with alternative solutions. See what you can discover -- that's how I found out about a trick with wee stinker/button/gate movement, for example.

From there on, try to complicate the level. Work backwards. In order to achieve this trick, the player needs resources X, Y, Z -- how can you make it harder to get them? Often it's possible to chain several tricks in a row, which makes it harder to figure out any of them, since each individual trick does not look particularly necessary.

Two advanced tactics you can use are misdirection and what I would call interconnection. Misdirection is really motivation -- in a hard level with misdirection, every object used for a specific trick should ideally have some other "apparent reason" to exist, a more obvious-looking purpose. Sometimes this apparent reason is real (and the object is just multi-use), sometimes it's not and you have to use something else to do the same thing.

RTW example because RTW thinking is easier for me: imagine a bunch of reflectors, a cannon and a line of boxes to be cleared in the same room. Well, maybe the reflectors need to be moved into a very different spot and used merely as fancier steel boxes in water, while the boxes might be cleared out with a boulder from somewhere else. Or maybe you do use the reflectors for the boxes... and then still move them elsewhere for other purposes.

Interconnection is very mean and nasty, and is a way to make your difficulty skyrocket even in relatively small levels if you can make it happen. When faced with a complex mental task, we try to break it down into simpler ones. The more your puzzle resists this process, the more interconnected its various parts are, the more difficult it'll be to solve, since the player will likely have to hold the entire puzzle in their head. Consider my "Rooms of Confusion" for RTW, it's a 14x14 (like most of my levels), but you have to really think about the whole thing at once. An even worse example is "Deceptively Deceptive", which, after forgetting the solution, I never actually re-solved because the top half of the level is one big interconnected mess and is even partially interconnected with the bottom half, too.

If you can turn your interconnected puzzle into a series of fake mini-puzzles that look solvable separately, but something doesn't work out if you do, it'll be even harder. An extreme example is David Stolp's "Same Game", converted into RTW by LinkyNStoof. The five Sokoban-ish rooms look like separate puzzles, but aren't. This way, the level doesn't merely resist being broken down into smaller pieces, it actively encourages an improper breakdown. If the solver falls prey to this, they'll never figure out the last room.

One related thing you can do is create layouts where a particular room has an obvious way to enter it that you shouldn't use and a tricky way that you should use instead. Level geometry like this can be a powerful way to interconnect various parts while making them look separate. (The second, fixed version of my "The Lost Cave" for RTW does this)

In advanced stages of puzzle-making, you might be able to make levels that appear obviously unsolvable in the starting configuration. A sufficiently small level with a sufficiently non-obvious solution can trigger an "I can prove this unsolvable, you've gotta be kidding me!" reaction. An example of me trying to do that in RTW is "Security Through Insanity" -- there are four buttons and four laser gates to pass, but only three link spheres and no other objects to cover the last button. Some pretty tricky moves are required.

...

... but remember: at the end of the day, all this stuff is just a bunch of words. There's no replacement for the good old "to improve how you make stuff, make a lot of stuff". Don't be disappointed if your first results aren't that great. There's no replacement for practice, both for solving and for creating.
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Rest in peace, Marinus. A bright star, you were ahead of me on my own tracks of thought. I miss you.
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rainbowmon
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Re: puzzle making tips?

Post by rainbowmon » Wed Apr 07, 2021 9:51 pm

Thought I would share this since it fits the topic - the Architect Of Games on YouTube just released a video about puzzle design: https://youtu.be/KAd3lCQFhPc Could help inspire someone who needs a few pointers.
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