Experimenting With Larger Clues
Writing another post so soon because I’ve been really enjoying the challenge of making Nurikabe puzzles. As I mentioned in my last post about them, from a design perspective they take the path building you would learn from making Labyrinths and teach you to combine that with understanding the permutations of clues.
For a refresher on how Nurikabe puzzles work:
Numbered clues indicate islands. The number in the clue showcases the amount of cells that belong to that island. These cells must not be filled in. The islands contain the numbered clue as well.
A cell in an island must not be orthogonally adjacent to the cell from another island as they would then join islands and invalidate the clues.
Between islands a continuous black line must be drawn by the player which is unbroken across the puzzle. This black line must not occupy a 2x2 block of cells.
What I wanted to do this time was focus on being able to use larger clues and seeing how I can go about constraining them since there are many permutations they can have. What I found was that when the island clues are bigger, it gives the player more freedom to try and solve the puzzle in different ways.
The first few attempts weren’t great. The first two there were an attempt at symmetrical puzzle design where the large clue in the middle was surrounded by smaller clues that constrained it. But they either weren’t unique or were just uninteresting. The third one is where I started to discover how large clue numbers really give players freedom so as a designer, if you want to make a unique puzzle you have to constrain it in some way with other clues.
So I started to do that with this one. I took one large clue (the 6) and tried to find ways to constrain it with smaller clues on its edges so that it took up the far right column and one extra cell. This largely worked and the puzzle has a potentially nice flow by examining how the 1 and 2 clues are in turn constrained by their relationship to the 6 clue and how they allow a path to wind around them.
However, I did test the puzzle across a couple of different days and found it wasn’t unique. I had a voice in the back of my head that told me to look at the 6 clue again because I wasn’t truly convinced that it was constrained.
It almost was constrained but not quite! From experimenting out with playtesting the puzzle I managed to figure out that the 1,2 and 6 clues could stay the same, I just needed to change the 3 clue. 3 clues are already pretty adaptable but with the amount of clues in the space if I changed it to a 4 it took up the space I needed to constrain the 6 back down so it wasn’t taking up another cell in the middle.
As with any type of skill, the more you practise the better you get and it’s nice to see that happening with Nurikabes. There’s a long way to go with a bunch of different puzzle types but I’m enjoying getting back into designing puzzles more often.
