What Makes a Good Puzzle? | Game Maker's Toolkit

Great video ! I like all the themes related to the game design and puzzle, i think making a puzzle is about understanding the system, better you understand, the system "reward" better puzzle for you. And the process of how to build/find the system and study it, it's what a game designer should do first when comes with puzzle game, this is what i learned from some great puzzle games.

BioLogic

Nice

Awesome video, I've been wanting to learn more about puzzles for a long time, so I was very excited when I saw that you'd made this! I loved the breakdown of the process. Particularly with the Portal example, I could see the designers thought process. The assumption is that you will have a block for each place it is needed. It tests your understanding of the portal gun's ability to manipulate light bridges and the physics of boxes. Finally, it tests your spatial awareness, showing that you don't need to be near an object to manipulate it if you have the portal gun. Awesome! The tricky thing for me is thinking up these ideas in the first place, and as you describe, a lot of testing and changes likely go in to make all of the gameplay elements line up. The creativity and genius to come up with the idea of portals, and all that comes with it, seems fully formed from the players perspective, but behind the scenes took a lot of work and revising.

Mark M

Fabulous video. Congratulations on hitting 400K, well deserved.

Renmeleon

Hi Mark English is not my first language. I hope I can get my point across. I´ m a big fan of puzzle games and I also thought about that subject alot. I´ m quit surprised that you didnt talk about The Witness because that game has great puzzle design. Good puzzles games have a set of rules which surprise you with new ideas. A puzzle doesnt have to be hard it only has to be interesting. You can make puzzles extremely hard by throwing in red herrings and alot of elements. But that doesnt make it good or interesting. Its about discovering new ideas. Also a good puzzle doesnt need any mechanical skill to solve. If your game has action elements then the player can sometimes think that his skill isnt enough and this then becomes a red herring. Good puzzles have no red herrings. A puzzle should also not be tedious to solve. There is nothing more frustrating then having solved a puzzle in your head and now you have to go through tedious work to put the solution into the game. The Talos Principal and Portal do this to an extent. Good puzzles also have all the information you need on a single screen or the information is at least your near reach. Remembering puzzle elements (maybe because its a big room) can also be interesting but most of the time inputing the solution can get tedious. (as in the point above) I would really love to hear your thoughts on The Witness. Like Stephens Sausage Roll its a pure puzzle game where the reward is more puzzles. It doesnt delude its gamedesign with additional addons. Its a puzzle game for people who like puzzles and not a vihicle for a story. I really liked that. It felt genuine.

Congrats on 400K subscribers, looking forward to checking out this episode!

mcwizardry

Great episode! Thanks, Mark :)

Awesome episode! And a really great breakdown, one of your best episodes so far I think!

congrats on the sub count!

Cesar Palafox

Oh my god! I remember that puzzle in talos principle pissing me off so much, literally spent three hours trying to solve it!