Level Design Workshop: Solving Puzzle Design

All right, good morning everybody. Thanks Joel for the introduction.

This is a little design in a day and this is a talk a topic that's near and dear to my heart solving puzzle design.

A bit of a background on me. I

began my career at Telltale Games as a cinematic artist

and a designer and now I'm a level designer

at Ubisoft Studio SF just around the corner on

the new South Park RPG the fractured but whole think

about it so

why puzzles I love puzzles because designing

a good puzzle means you're combining tons

of different concepts and game design altogether to make

a really cool unit of game a

good game now get so you have your mechanics your level design your narrative balancing your difficulty, progression, these are all things that go into puzzles that make a puzzle great a great experience for a player.

So in this talk I'm just going to start with exactly what a puzzle is,

defining that in the context of level design, talk about what

makes a puzzle good, and then we're going to go into the elements of a puzzle, rational puzzle design, how to build a puzzle, and then some tips for troubleshooting puzzles when they just don't make sense.

So let's Let's start off with what is a puzzle?

So puzzles are kind of hard to define. Again, we have the level design domain to kind of work within.

But in general,

one of my favorite definitions for puzzles is it's a game with a dominant strategy, which is when you have choices that are offered to a player, but one of them is clearly better than the rest.

And now this usually is not a good thing in game design. You want a player to be able to choose what they want to do.

You want them to have decisions they can make. But you can still have that with a dominant strategy.

And that's because puzzles are games with one solution. That's what they are inherently.

And that's because while games are played to win, puzzles are played to find a solution. At their very heart, they are about finding that strategy.

So your gameplay finds in the challenge of getting that dominant strategy nailed down.

So a puzzle is a challenge, but it's not a competitive challenge.

It's the player stopping and thinking about a challenge that you as the designer have given them.

You know, adventure games are a great example of this. This is Grim Fandango.

You're gonna, you know, you're playing a detective, so it's all about finding clues, figuring out who you need to talk to next, learning about the world and applying that.

always stopping and thinking the way a detective would. I also have up here Angry Birds.

Now, Angry Birds is also a puzzle game because if you think about it, there is an ideal way to destroy all the pigs in their home.

That's messaged with the star system. There is a dominant, ideal way, a most efficient way, using the birds you have to solve the puzzle of breaking a bunch of pigs' homes.

So what makes a puzzle good? Does anyone know?

Fun is important to a puzzle being good.

But that fun should come from the challenge. And that challenge happens when the player feels a sense of trust and respect from the designer.

How do you get that trust and respect? You invite the player to find a solution. You don't hand them one.

You let them try to find it themselves. But you also make sure that solution is attainable.

You don't challenge, you don't, you know, be the awful GM who just kills all your players.

You're always letting them at least get out of the situation by their own merit.

And so if you do achieve that, the player has a sense of accomplishment of getting through something themselves.

So thinking about it that way, it's players learning how to get out of a situation. Learning is fun.

And learning is fun because knowledge is power.

Games are all about feeling powerful in your surroundings or well-equipped to handle a situation.

And so providing knowledge, that provides power.

And when you're in a situation where you're stopping to think about a puzzle, feeling powerful means knowing how to solve it.

So, this is a talk that was at GDC last year. It's called Precision of Emotion, A New Kind of Fun Approach.

And this was given by a woman named Erin Hoffman.

And her theory on fun is that the search for knowledge that a player undergoes is this emotional journey

by which they achieve mastery, mastery of a situation, of a concept, of a puzzle.