Blog 3: Physical Puzzle

Blog 3: Physical Puzzle

By Payton Grady

The Puzzle

    In my puzzle, I created an unusual take on a maze. Rather than simply searching for the correct way out, the player is looking at an entirely enclosed box. In this situation, the player is supposed to think outside the box by folding corners to find a proper start point and end point, and finally draw a path between the two. This combines several different puzzle types into one model: unusual use of an object, sequence, and preparing the way.

Avoiding Poor Design

 

    According to Bates, bad puzzle design involves restore puzzles, arbitrary puzzles, binary puzzles, and designer puzzles. Restore puzzles are bad designs because they immediately punish the player before giving them a chance to study their puzzle environment. I avoided this problem by excluding any sort of punishment for players who don't make the right guess the first time. I feel as if my puzzle got close to being an arbitrary puzzle. I intentionally included multiple configurations for the player to win, as well as a few for the player to lose.

 

 

 

     However, there is still a cause-and-effect link between the player's actions and the puzzle's results. The player has to rearrange the maze into a logical formation to get from the entrance to the exit, but there is more than one right and wrong answer to choose from. Because of that flexibility, this ended up not being a binary puzzle because the puzzle is not a one-way win/lose situation, but rather a series of complex decisions the player makes that can give him or her a wider range of outcomes. Last of all, I did not want the puzzle to only be understood by me being the designer, so I included a note saying that the player needs to use the corners to solve the puzzle.

Incorporating Good Design Principles

 

    According to Bates, the first part of good puzzle design is fairness, since "the answer to every puzzle is contained within the game" (Bates). I maintained fairness by doing exactly that, providing the player with all the resources needed to create a path out of the maze. Generally, puzzles have to be natural to the game's environment too. Since the maze is essentially the game in this instance, the puzzle of rearranging pathways alters yet fits cleanly into the environment. The puzzle also has to amplify a theme, which would be thinking outside of the box and creatively using resources in this instance. By allowing the players several correct ways to solve the puzzle, winning is an exciting surprise but can also be logically explained, causing what is known as the "V-8 response".

Increasing Difficulty

 

    While my puzzle is a fairly simple premise, there is an effective way to increase difficulty: add an extra card. By doing this, the player has a different maze to work in, but can also adjust the configuration of the maze's center. But not all paths in the cards are meant to correspond to the original start and end points. This provides the player with different alternate solutions, less bread crumbs that they can pick up, and even a few red herrings that would not be present in the easy difficulty.

 

My Idea

 

    After designing this puzzle, I realized that even simple puzzles have some difficulty in terms of both design and gameplay. Reflecting on this, I am going to start off with a simpler idea: a Tetris-inspired puzzle. The door will be on a higher level than the player, so the player will have to rearrange different blocks or platforms into something that resembles a staircase. This would be a good puzzle because it is challenging, yet intuitive.

Works Cited

 

Bates, Bob. “Designing the Puzzle.” THE ART OF?Puzzle Game Design,         www.scottkim.com.previewc40.carrierzone.com/thinkinggames/GDC00/bates.html.