The Art of Puzzle Design | How Game Designers Explore Ideas and Themes with Puzzles and Problems

This Video Explores the Art of Puzzle Design, and how game designers explore ideas and themes using both puzzles and problems. Puzzle design is often viewed as an arcane art only a few are privy to, but in this essay, we explore the many design philosophies creators have employed to manufacture them. What we find is there are as many ways to make a puzzle as there are puzzles themselves, and this pluralism feeds into what the purpose of puzzles have been and are in our society today.

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We explore games as varied as The Witness, braid, Baba is You, Infinifactory, Stephens sausage roll and fez to support the idea that puzzle are ultimately the aesthetic form of thought itself.

Sources

Books
- The Puzzle Instinct Marcel Danesi
- Bob Bates -On game design
- Infinite Powers Steven Strogatz
- Is God a programmer? Geoff Simons

Videos

-Gdc talk Solving Puzzle Design Jolie Menzel

- Empuzzlement Blow, droquen, Ten Bosche

-Designing to reveal the nature of the universe

-The Arcane art of puzzle dependency diagrams

-Open ended puzzle design at zachtronics

- Breaking Conventions with the legend of zelda

-Making Baba is you

-Bob Bates Designing the puzzle

- A look back at fezs Black Monolith

- Designing Baba is yous rule wrtiing system

-How to make a good puzzle

Gdc hearts and minds

[thinker]

Just, wow. This is probably the best video about puzzle design and probably game design I've ever watched. The thing about the community of Fez brute-forcing the Black Monolith, and "ending up with the solution to a question they did not know" is such a brilliant way of putting that situation. Something else which I find interesting to note is how humans are unique in that we're about the only species on this planet which creates puzzles. There may be puzzles to solve in nature, but we're the only species to actively seek out those puzzles and even go so far as to create new ones, which seems illogical by every definition, but that's what makes us unique.

[GameDesignFoundry]

Out of all my Game Design knowledge, puzzle design is easily my weakest, I enjoyed the video a lot, even learned a whole bunch I didn’t know about! Keep it up my friend!😁

[tylerackerman]

This video is criminally under watched. Fantastic job! Puzzles are my favorite type of game, and this really helped shed some fascinating light on them.

[CreativeSteve]

i just discovered ya on my timeline this video got recommended to me. I thoroughly enjoyed this talk about puzzle game design a lot. I'm a beginner level of a gamedev myself and this was a thorough eye-opener of how to create my puzzles for my first game. Will definitely give your other videos a watch.

[SarahMaeBea]

An incredibly dense and well researched video! I really like the concept of puzzles as a way to find ultimate truth in the universe. Communication with an intentional creator. Even if it's the small universe of a video game, and the creator is a human.

[SnailSpaceWTF]

WELL DONE! Such a well thought out video as I explore puzzle authoring myself

[findthestones]

Great video. Learned a lot. Thanks for sharing!!

[Paruthi.]

awesome video.. lot of very useful information, Thanks

[Ceej]

this was such an amazing video to listen to, nice work and thank you gave me a lot to think about for my puzzle game

[gd]

What’s with the weird comments? Did you buy comments or something

[dontcallithzzzln]

Came here for game dev advice, left with an existensial crisis

[precurrentgaming]

Generally my experience is that we have an innate desire to “know”. Solving things is a prime way to meet this desire, as coming up with a solution that works is a clear way to show that we “know” whatever it is we are solving for. Puzzles play off of that because they create a scenario to demonstrate knowledge by achieving a solution.

[j.m.]

I like video games, but I don't like video games in which I have to compete against others people like FPS or sports games. But I really like puzzle games. Your video made me realize that puzzle games are games in which you compete against yourself and not others and I think this is what I like the most about puzzle games.

[JohnDaniels]

What did you think about Limbo and Inside puzzles?

[opalkunz]

Fantastic video, thank you.
Great video. Thanks.

[sahil_juneja]

Great video. Would have also loved a discussion/views on games like Hitman (recent 2) and how they approach the sandbox type puzzle design.

[belalghozlan]

Fantastic video, thank you.
Great video. Thanks.
Great video. Thanks.
Great video! Btw, I need information about music that plays at 6:24
Thanks!

[bornacmrecnjak]

Great video! Btw, I need information about music that plays at 6:24
Thanks!

[p.boyerrichard]

Great video. Thanks.
Great video! Btw, I need information about music that plays at 6:24
Thanks!
Fantastic video, thank you.
Great video. Thanks.
Great video. Thanks.
Fantastic video, thank you.

[stephenkamenar]

how could you not include the awesome sound when showing the witness world puzzles