Focus on gameplay
Puzzle Design Principles in Limbo
- Challenging problem-solving
- There’s a difference between pretending to solve a puzzle (doing a puzzle) vs. actually solving a puzzle (thinking through, arriving at conclusion, executing)
- Easy and quickly-understandable mechanics
- As few elements as possible and simple elements
- Discourage brute-force trial and error, it ends with the player not getting enough of a sense of achievement
- Don’t repeat puzzles, puzzles do not have replay value
- Solve complicated problems with simple explanation
- Do not challenge player through volume of STUFF
Ideal play script
- Arrive at puzzle
- Attempt obvious solution
- Fail
- Learn by dying
- Player stops, analyzes situation and derives strategies
- Solve the problem
The more the player struggles, the more rewarding the solution will be
How can we predict the wrong strategies that players will attempt, and how can we let them know those strategies will be wrong?
Anticipate how the player will solve your puzzle through:
- Playtesting
- Thought exercises
- Scripting it out
You can always count on the player to press the button
Intentionally mislead the player, which reveals some piece of information about the puzzle
Player needs to know what to do when they arrive at the puzzle (get to point B)
Two ways to think of player – you only want him to get stuck for a little bit
Enemy
- Plant devious tricks and foils in the puzzle
- Deliberately Frustrate the player
Friend
- Environment is accessible and readable quickly
What is the core idea of the puzzle, keep focused on that?
Puzzle should be easy to execute. Once the player has figured it out, it should only take him one go to execute it.
Don’t let the player think the puzzle is impossible
Playdead’s Editor
- Like a 2D unreal with kismet layered on top of it
- Play-in-editor
- Builder brushes
- Kismet nodes link directly to objects in world
- Joints and hinge actors
- Physics
- Prefabs (with scripts, particles, and “mesh”)
- Encourages designers to keep puzzle simple by muddying their view with all their kismet linkages