How To Fail At Testing Your Puzzles

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Music:
Doh De Oh by Kevin MacLeod

[Artindi]

Puzzle games are really hard to market, because you don't want to show the solutions or even sometimes the puzzle itself. This again is an area where you might need a unique enough mechanic that the mechanic can be shown off instead of the puzzles.

[DragoPl]

Or you can just make find the button game, everyone love finding buttons

[DorianWhittlinger]

If you're making a grid based puzzle game, and you need more filler levels to draw out playtime, try placing blocks randomly until you come up with something that just so happens to be hard. Everyone loves a level where the solution is unobvious and gives you a headache. This is a crucial strategy in designing the late game, because randomly placed blocks doesn't require creativity and unique implementations of your core mechanic.

[YEAHKINDA]

No, no, you're wrong.

You SHOULD playtest the puzzles by yourself just to make sure that you didn't get really unlucky and make an actually good puzzle.

[yowza]

This is a great introduction to the topic for new developers, but more advanced developers will probably appreciate the extra nuance that this video (understandably, given its target audience) leaves out: You actually *can* playtest your own puzzles if you know how to do it correctly.

Specifically, if you finish designing a puzzle, then test it and discover that you were able to find a solution, your puzzle is too easy. Noobs, of course, don't deserve to play the Dark Souls of puzzle games, and veteran players will love the added uncertainty behind puzzles with no known solutions. This will also attract and motivate speedrunners to find glitches to bypass "impossible" sections, which leads to GDQ airtime (i.e. free marketing).