Lecture
The lecture on puzzle design was a great introduction to the fundamental characteristics of a well-made puzzle. Considering mechanics, goals, catches, revelations, assumptions and presentation is of key importance to puzzle design.
If puzzles find their way into my design document for Slam City Skates, I will need to remember that their inclusion should be intended to make the game more fun, and not feel like an after-thought. They should be an obstacle that supports the core of the game.
GDD work
This week marked the beginning of my work on the GDD for Slam City Skates, my hypothetical open world roller-skating game. I began by looking at the exemplar documents provided on the learning space for inspiration. It seemed that they all started out by detailing the high-level design details and concepts. Taking inspiration, I made a couple of slides discussing the concept, and outlining the core pillars of the game’s design. By putting these things at the forefront of the document, I able to make sure readers are on-board with the idea, before going on to elaborate further in. Next, I plan to discuss target demographics.
Individual challenge
The lessons learnt in our puzzle design lecture led into the individual challenge assigned this week. We were tasked with creating a puzzle based around defusing a bomb, using the techniques and principles introduced to us by Nick.
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A grid-based puzzle similar to Minesweeper where you must find and defuse the bombs on a battlefield.
The player must dig in places to uncover the locations of the bombs. They will be told exactly how many bombs must be found in each level.
One catch: if you dig up directly over a bomb, it explodes! At this point the level will reset.
Each level has a unique layout, with buildings shaping the play space. However, the placement of the bombs will be randomised, to avoid exploitation of the mechanics.
The player always starts by digging the center tile.
Once you dig up a tile, the player will able to hear the ticking of a bomb (if there are any on an adjacent tile), letting them know a bomb is in the vicinity. Depending on the intensity of the beep, they will be able to deduce the number of bombs in the adjacent area. This can only be heard when the player is stood on the dug-up tile.
Through careful and decisive digging, the player will be able to pinpoint the location of the bombs in the level, placing markers wherever they think they are. If the player changes their mind, they can pick up and replace their markers at any time.
Once they are done, the player can click to end the level.
If they were correct in their placement an animation of the character extracting and defusing the bombs will play out, the player will be congratulated, and the level will advance.
If they were incorrect, the whole area will blow up, and the level will restart.
Below is an example of an early level with a step-by-step of how someone might complete it:
Key:
White tile – Play space
Black tile – Dug area
Brown tile – Building (non-playable area)
Pink dot – Point at which you can hear a bomb
Red dash – Placed marker
Spin on minesweeper
Feedback for improvement
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I was happy with the idea, as I think it has mechanical simplicity that allows for tactical complexity. It is something I would like to develop further as a personal project, possibly prototyping it when I can. I got some helpful feedback too, with one peer suggesting that I could even add a limited amount of tiles to dig up per level as a further constraint to the player. This is definitely something to consider, if it can be implemented without being too frustrating it would add an extra layer of complexity.
One submission that I found very interesting came from fellow designer Ryan Minty, who interpreted the challenge less literally. He came up with a ‘social diffusion’ game, in which the bomb is actually an escalating argument that has to be settled. I really like this idea and it shows that you can come up with creative solutions to seemingly straightforward tasks.
Iron challenge
This week’s group challenge tasked us with designing a puzzle system based around electricity. Our team decided to make a grid-based connection game similar to The Witness (2016), however ours had a significant twist – it takes place in first-person and real-time.
Titled ‘Groovin Gaffer’, the game would see players trying to connect electrical nodes on a dancefloor to set up for a 70’s disco. There would be environmental hazards thrown in which modify how players engage with the puzzles in novel ways. For instance, some tiles may have water spilt on them and if the player electrifies more than two adjacent nodes then the tile becomes electrified and unable to be stepped on by the player. Other tiles may drop down to form a chasm that the player would be at risk of falling into.
We were really happy with this concept and felt that it had a good amount of modularity, being able to be expanded on and developed further. We came up with some fun puzzle designs that left some people who playtested feeling genuinely stumped.
Further reading
As with each week, I have been engaging with the Talis resource list. This week I started reading The Art of Game Design (Schell, 2008). It is by far the best book on game design I have read. By breaking down design considerations into digestible ‘lenses’ for us to look at our games through, Schell is able to effectively convey the fundamentals and intricacies of design. There is an accompanying website (Schell) that lists all of the lenses featured in the book, which I will consult whenever evaluating my own designs, to ensure that I make the best possible decisions.
I also watched the GMTK video on puzzle design, as it was referenced many times in our lecture. I resonated with Mark’s point on minimalism in puzzle design, where he says that “a good puzzle is pretty minimalist, with almost no extraneous elements” (GMTK, 2018). I think that this is highly important as difficulty should arise from the player figuring out how they arrive at the solution not what that solution is. A minimal presentation provides a minimal barrier between the player and the actual solving of the puzzle.
References
GAME MAKER’S TOOLKIT. 2018. What Makes a Good Puzzle? [YouTube essay]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsjC6fa_YBg [accessed 5 October 2021].
SCHELL, Jesse. 2008. The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses. Boca Raton : CRC Press
SCHELL, Jesse. ca. 2008. ‘Game Design: A Deck of Lenses’. [online]. Available at: http://deck.artofgamedesign.com/#/?lang=en [accessed 7 October 2021].
The Witness. 2016. Thekla, Inc.