Puzzles by Train
I haven’t been as active on the blog recently but I’ve found a good time to keep exercising that game design muscle through puzzle design. Every Wednesday I take a 1 hour 45 minute train journey to go coach fencing at my old university club. That’s a long amount of time and you can definitely get 2 or 3 good puzzles designed in that time or at the very least get better at a particular format.
So I thought in an effort to catch up with a few of my train puzzles I’ve been doing in the last weeks I’ll post them in one larger post without a massive amount of commentary (mostly because I focused on creating them without writing notes since the train would mess up my handwriting and I would have no idea anyway what it said).
I quite like this Kakuro because it separates the puzzle into north and south portions that can be done independtly and eventually require finishing both of them as far as you can go so they can inform each other.
Wobbly lines and all these two Nurikabes were just to try retain some of that technique and muscle memory from previously doing quite a lot of them. I believe doing lots of different types of square grid puzzles gives you a good shorthand for puzzle design but more specifically for different types of square grid puzzles. It’s a fairly obvious thing to say but the goal here is not necessarily about getting better at square grid puzzles but to get better at design in many different facets:
Adaptability in being able to know how to go about learning a new format - essentially learning the basic tools of how to go about learning things quickly
How to identify solving solutions in a new format through this creation process. By mapping out solving solutions you become better as a designer by creating puzzles/levels specifically adapted to those methods. this allows you to tutorialise these methods better
From these solving solutions identify a logical difficulty curve so you can pace the player’s experience better
Being able to bounce back and forth between puzzle formats is important because I want to see how certain puzzle types have specific solving logics and how they’re shared across square grid puzzles. Identifying these patterns and learning how to identify these patterns is a great step forward into getting experience across several genres of game design.
Renzokus are the most recent ‘new puzzle’ format I’ve been exploring. And they’ve been fun to design in their own right. But they provide a core challenge I’m still yet to figure out in design that has me very excited. That challenge is the placement of numbers in rows and columns without them repeating.
It’s a core principle of Sudoku and I’m just experiencing the first parts of how to design for that with Renzokus but it is elusive and difficult. What makes me excited about being able to make Renzokus is that it gets me closer to being able to make Sudokus. For me that’s essentially one of the holy grails of puzzle design if you’re able to make them. The sky is the limit when it comes to Sudoku varients and what excites me is being able to work on a puzzle type thats possibility scales with your own design skill. Hopefully in the next blog post I’ll be showing my first explorations of the Sudoku format.
