Using Another Grid
I quite like the puzzle I’ve made today. It segments the grid nicely on the left hand side and does a few interesting things. I usually draw out the grid I want to use then map out the route I’d like players to take, then constrain them with walls.
Labyrinth Puzzle Rules:
Enter from one door, exit from another
Every tile must be crossed exactly once
Moves are made orthogonally
Walls cannot be passed through
For this labyrinth puzzle today I used another 6x6 square grid to map out the route I wanted (I’ll put that picture at the end of this piece, but be warned it does have the solution). This immediately showed me the borders I could use for creating interesting walls for constraints on the player.
Using walls is one of the core parts of creating a labyrinth puzzle. If you use too many then you explicitly map out the path for players. If you use too few then they can really go wherever they want. So your difficulty on these puzzles really hangs on balancing between a lack of challenge on either side.
But walls also have importance in and of themselves. They are contextually relevant with other walls and constrain the player in a wide variety of ways. It’s important to recognise the shapes that your walls are creating when placing them, whether they are creating or suggesting rooms shapes to players. Because I usually draw the route first, it separates that process of drawing the walls, so I feel like the puzzle loses something in its construction, perhaps a more authored intention in terms of difficulty.
I think in future I should think beyond that first instinct to draw the route first. It’s hard to gauge how difficult the puzzle is going to be from that or the player experience that’s going to happen. To really make good labyrinth puzzles, or any good puzzle, I think the designer has to be thinking about several elements in tandem and how they work together. I think the first stage of doing that is going to be making a labyrinth puzzle from a different angle. Maybe tomorrow, I’ll go with walls first!
