The results are in after last night’s playtest, and Escape Goat Alpha 5 is the new face of drinkability. OK, what I meant to say was that the testers really understood the puzzles better, enjoyed experimenting, and felt rewarded when they completed them. This was a big changes from Alpha 4, where testers found several of the puzzles so confusing they resorted to trial-and-error.
So what changed?
I have a new approach to puzzle design. This post is probably a version of something the masters have already discussed at length, and I’m pretending like I’ve discovered the wheel. But bear with me, I’m a do-it-yourselfer (to a fault) and maybe there’s some original research in here. Read on.
This all started with a study project where I spent an afternoon playing various puzzle games on Kongregate and Newgrounds. (I know, this is totally like real work.) I wanted to see how games dealt with the Unsolvable Puzzle Dilemma–how they let the player know it was time to restart a level after it couldn’t be solved anymore. After playing about 20 games, I found that each of them falls neatly into one of two categories:
Type 1:
These are the reparable puzzles, where you can undo moves all the way back to the original state of the puzzle. There is no unsolvable state. A “restart” of the puzzle only serves as a shortcut. Examples: Rubik’s Cube, simple mazes, slider puzzles. Portal 2 is a Type 1 puzzle; even though the environment permanently changes as you progress through a room, it’s never in an unsolvable state. There’s no need for a restart button in Type 1 puzzles.
Type 2:
These puzzles have consequences for every move. After you’ve made your moves, you’ve either solved the puzzle or failed it. A restart is now necessary. Any game featuring destructible environments, blocks that merge together, switches that can only be used once… these are all Type 2’s. Some examples are: Sudoku, Lemmings, Adventures of Lolo.
Categorizing games into one of these two camps makes things more straightforward. Type 1’s are all about experimentation and movement within the puzzle, maybe inching toward completion 5 steps forward and 4 steps back. Type 2’s are about coming up with a plan, executing the plan, and observing the results. They are different enough that I bet if you ran a brain scan of people solving either puzzle type, different parts of the brain would light up for each type.
So wouldn’t Braid be a great example of type 1? I mean, you can rewind time as much as you want.
Not so fast. Some levels in Braid are Type 1, and some are what I’m going to call:
Type 3:
This is the black magic, the unholy witch’s brew combining both styles. Parts of the puzzle are reparable, and parts are not.
Remember the levels in Braid with the glowy green objects? Some of them got permanently messed up if you didn’t do things in a certain order. And yet you could still rewind time… you had a sense of being able to repair parts of the puzzle, yet not the whole thing. And that’s what made these puzzles some of the hardest: once you knew you could make a permanent mistake that your magic time rewinding couldn’t fix, you were forced to question whether you had messed up the puzzle.
Braid did a good job of conveying the unsolvable state, usually with a green door that was shut, or a key that was destroyed and unusable. You could look at the door and “get it.” It was time to exit the level and restart fresh.
Back to Escape Goat. I applied this paradigm to the new levels I made for yesterday’s playtest by making sure each puzzle room fit squarely in either Type 1 or Type 2. Rooms that had to be restarted made it clear that there was nothing left to do–no toggle switches that would shift things back and forth. (I even added the Back button as a hotkey to restart the room. The presence of a hotkey should clue players in that restarting is a way of life for some of these puzzles and is nothing to be ashamed of.)
Am I going to have any Type 3 puzzles? Probably, but not until the final stages. I recognize that this takes the most brainpower and shouldn’t be foisted on the player in the first ten minutes of the game.
When I set out to make Escape Goat, I had no idea all the things I would need to learn, least of all this categorization of puzzles. I would absolutely love to hear back from you experienced puzzle game designers. I’m probably just scratching the surface here.
Not a designer, but a fan.
I’d say your Type 3 is redundant. If you can’t undo every mistake to make a puzzle solvable, then the puzzle remains unsolvable. That I could still push around blocks in a Sokoban game means nothing if a needed block is stuck in a corner unable to be moved any further to come to the solution.
Likewise, just as in Sokoban, if the level clearly indicates an unsolvable state as in your Escape Goat example, then a simple restart or undo option would suffice. Once the blocks obstruct the exit, a player should be well aware that he/she can’t proceed.
There is definitely a gray area between types 2 and 3. I would classify Sokoban as a Type 2 because most moves cause a permanent state change–you can’t pull blocks backwards. If Sokoban were changed so that some blocks could be pulled and remained mutable, it would become more of a Type 3 game.