Level Design Workshop: Solving Puzzle Design

[Music] all right good morning everybody thanks Joel for the introduction this is a little design a day and this is a talk a topic that's near and dear to my heart solving a 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 Studios SF just around the corner on the new Southfork RPG the fractured but whole think about it so why puzzles I love puzzles because does I need a good puzzle means you're combining tons of different concepts in game design all together to make a really cool unit of game a good game nugget 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 gonna 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 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 with them but in general a good 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 solute at their very heart they are about finding that strategy so your gameplay finds in the challenge of getting that time the strategy nailed down so a puzzle is a challenge but it's not a competitive challenge it's the players 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 fandago you're gonna you know you're 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 you're 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 a ideal way

to destroy all the pigs and their home that's a message with like the kind of 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 things homes so what makes a puzzle good does anyone know fun is important to a puzzle being good it's oh but that fun should come from the challenge and that challenge happens when the player feels a sense of trust from and respect from the designer now 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 it's players learning how to get out of a situation learning is fun and learning is fun because knowledge is power you know games are all about feeling powerful in your surroundings well equipped to handle a situation and so providing knowledge that provides power and you know when you're in a situation where you're stuck and think about a puzzle feeling powerful means knowing how to solve it so um this is a talk that was at GBC 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 this 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 and this a moat and so she called this emotion of finding mastery Sophia so an emotion of mastery and a lot of it's actually built on jumpy J's cognitive development studies from the mid twentieth century so it's all about how humans find knowledge and how they're engaged in finding knowledge so this is this is a chart kind of thank you I got to like this is a chart illustrating kind of what Hoffman calls this a feel loop which is the this emotional journey one goes through a player goes through and are solving a puzzle going through a game so at first the player is confronted by fear they have an absence of skill they don't know what to do they're afraid and then they go through this kind of cycle of emotions they all fall under the general idea of surprise or being surprised but you know all things that go into speculating being curious discovering something for any insight and then when

that all comes together and they do find a solution they have the experience happiness they have a happiness of a mastery this Sophia feeling and it puzzles specifically I like to call mastery insight because that's really what you're finding is you're finding insight into a solution into how to do something so this loop if you guys have played the witness I think we all feel this a lot when we play the witness you know you see this like Lisa Frank nightmare and you're like what do I do about this puzzle I've no idea how to solve this but then you you know you think back to the fuzzles that you learned and you're like okay well I know I need to go from A to B I know I know how to solve this puzzle so you go through this kind of cycle of surprise of discovery and to come out victorious another an example I'll walk through son one spoil witness is a this is the flinging puzzle from portal 1 so this this puzzle comes in about midway through active portal about like level

10 and throughout the beginning of portal you've been crossing gaps kind of simply just by putting a portal next to you and hopping through it and you have an easy time getting across that gap that you couldn't before but then you come to this place and what happens is you look around and you see your gap but then you don't have any want to put your portals around you can't cross that gap the way you've been crossing gaps for the first 10 levels at this game so you feel fear how do I get across here a gun doesn't work but you have the knowledge of the game so you can kind of say okay well I know orange portals are usually by the goal so this orange puzzle might be near the goal and then you look below you in the pit and the pit you're trying to cross and you're like well duh I can put a portal on that that's cool I mean you realize oh the exits there that's how I get across and so you have this moment of surprise and then this kind of happiness that you've discovered

oh I know exactly how to cross this gap I know why that portal was where it is I know what to do so now let's start digging into puzzles and talking about what they're made of so the elements of a puzzle so the core of puzzles you're always basically finding a key that goes into a lock and sometimes the puzzles finding the key sometimes it's finding the lock sometimes the combination of both like any game puzzles are this creative combination of mechanics and theme in puzzles I like to break mechanics out into verbs so specifically mechanics that the player can use things that the player can do in their level so on the themed side we have narrative and presentation which kind of go hand in hand but they both contribute to giving the player a context for the world in a context for your puzzles and what they can do in it a strong narrative and a

puzzle gives a player a scaffold up to which they can kind of find relationships between different things different information that they've learned things in the world that they see and it disguises the design you're not throwing a Rubik's Cube in their face and stuff saying solve it you're disguising it in some way it turns pressing some buttons Simon Says style into a thing I did in the game a story I can tell about what I've achieved while I was playing so I want to focus on verbs I felt long and hard because in level design you kind of have these two camps of types of player verbs so I want to define those and talk about how they differ so I have two things up here Legend of Zelda Wind Waker and salmon max hit the road I tried two very different games and kind of hard time defining these verbs but I kind of landed on homogeneous verbs the systems-based verbs and then heterogeneous verbs context-based verbs so you have homogeneous verbs with this

grounding systemic actions that the player does just while playing the game when you're using this game verb the action has a very specific outcome that the player can anticipate will happen the meat of that puzzle is figuring out how to apply the verbs specific problems either alone or in combination so here we have the grappling hook from winwaker you can always target a horizontal pole like the one up there and it will have linked shoot has grappling hook and create a rope bridge a rope swing rather just swing across gaps and then that gets expanded upon you later see additional horizontal poles and well they still even still count on them to create rope swings they also might do things like pull switches the rope swings might be in large mimic create larger gaps there might be or challenging things around them but the player can always count on if I target a horizontal pull with my

grappling hook I'm probably going to create a rope and probably I'll swing across some kind of gap in some way and then with heterogeneous verbs this mostly applies to your classic aventure game the players herbs are usually examine get more information on the thing or use a thing on another thing so in this example we have salmon Max and Max is the rabbit if anyone doesn't know that so the player plays is Sam and instead of max in general max likes violence max likes to do bad things he likes to do violent things so if the player needs to do something of violence they know they can use max on that thing so in our in our top puzzle there's a cat here who has a piece of paper you need and you use max on the cat to pull the paper out of the stomach and then this bottom puzzle there's this tunnel

of love that you're trying to stop so that you can get out and kind of go in the secret door so once you find the fuse box with the flashlight you can take max and use them on the fuse box and Sam actually dunks him in the water and use them to short out the fuse box so those are two really different things using max isn't really predictable you have a theme your theme is telling you oh somatically I use max he's going to do something violent but he had something systemic that I can count on it's always very special face very person and that gives it a lot of flexibility you know Sam max is based on this comic book so when you play the Sam max games you feel like you're just playing the comic book dunking max in the water and shorting out a circuit is a story beam you know it's something they can do but yeah the importance you know not either Leader verb you have whatever type of herb you have it's that consistency that's important whether it comes from systems are whether it comes from

narrative just keeping a consistent world to for your player something that they can hook on to so they understand how your world works is what's important now I want to dive into difficulty so difficulty is kind of the secret element of puzzles and it's kind of that special sauce that really gets us that feeling of the player feeling trusted by the designer but then also being challenged by the designer so it's to get to the appropriate challenge you want to give the player we should understand the elements of your puzzle that can be manipulated to make the puzzles difficulty level appropriate to them it's the absolute hardest thing to get right and puzzles hands down getting that balance is always difficult and we'll go into that like a little bit later on the talk can we start more about building and troubleshooting puzzles and one more thing I'm going to illustrate I have three steps for

difficulty I want to talk about they are witnessed spoilers so if you haven't played the witness or don't to be spoiled turn around so the first aspect of a puzzle that you can tweak to make a puzzle easier harder is how many steps it takes to solve the puzzle or in games or the states the puzzles state of being solved isn't super explicit it's the amount of steps in amount of time that passes before the player receives feedback either positive or negative about how they've interacted with the puzzle so the tutorial pains and the witness are a great example of this they feel they feel much easier because you're being guided through each step of a puzzle you're getting feedback every time you learn even a nuance new concept of the puzzle that you're trying to solve and they get progressively harder because they add complications but they aren't overwhelming because you've been let into them very gradually and in succession and then give something else this puzzle on the top you know it's

kind of a clue but you have no immediate application to it you don't really you can't look around and understand what this clue means so inherently that puzzle is going to be a little harder for the player because you know even though the solution is very explicit you know it's very obviously a puzzle that your soul the player still has to kind of keep that in their mind they have to travel to that destination they have to find where it's applied to and then know that the solution they have is in their brain and they can apply it to that so that gap of time there's different steps to really add to the difficulty of a puzzle so the next kind of dial you have for puzzle difficulty is revealing new mechanics or reveal a new information so the first panel here on the left that's the first puzzle of the witness it's all it's teaching you is you can draw something from the start and to the end and that's all it's teaching you and the middle puzzle complicates a little bit it says hey you can make wrong turns sometimes if you go to a dead-end you

haven't completed the puzzle it also teaches you things like you can't loop around you can't the path cannot touch itself and then the last puzzle takes all of that and applies it to another mechanic it as a new mechanic of these colored dots and a player has to discover how to kind of deal with those different dots and learn what they mean then a third dial is kind of related its new applications of those mechanics or information so same mechanics same info but you're kind of applying and different layers finding in a different way than you're used to so in this example you know up till now you most of the puzzles even solving have been the solutions have been on the panels themselves but in this example the solution of the panel is not on the panel it's above you so you have to kind of the player has to make a mental leap to go oh I need to find information outside of this panel and look at this tree and make that connection and understand okay I can go get information

from about panels from outside so we have oh so witness what we've done if anyone was hiding so our difficulty dials stuff to solve new mechanics information new applications and mechanics that's half of the puzzle the puzzle no pun intended so you're not gonna finally appropriate level difficulty just using these you can't do that in the vacuum you have two forces acting on your designs that are going to influence the difficulty as well difficulty considerations so you have your intended audience who's playing your game and where your puzzle is in your game in your level in your game you need to consider where the puzzle is going to be experienced and how when it comes to your audience you know you're always really asking yourself why am I making this game and why are there puzzles in this game you might be making

a more narrative focused game and you don't want the puzzles to be too hard you don't want the player stuck you don't want you want and you want many players to be able to play this game very and be very you want the game to be very accessible to them so you might have difficulty that's a little lower than you might want or I think that you want and then but if you then your game is more challenge focused if your game if the point of your game is to challenge if it is to do game play if it's for an audience that you know once that challenge wants to solve puzzles but yeah your difficulty is going to go a little bit higher and for progression we're going to break out into rational puzzle design and what rational puzzle design or well rational design in general is introducing concepts in an orderly fashion and preserving your macro flow what does that mean my furfrou sounds like a rap name and what that means really is just looking at your game from top to bottom it means

understanding everything that you're making for your game where does it go in your game and when does the player experience it or when can they experience it so it's really taking your game breaking it out into a piece of your game finding a level it's in and finding your puzzle this is our portal puzzle we know it's an active in the game of Portal it's an Act one it's midway through Act one it's midway through the level and here's the steps to do the puzzle so I'm gonna do like a pretty deep dive onto with using this putt that portal puzzle as a case study just kind of go into a deep of how you can kind of break a puzzle or find a puzzle where a puzzle lives in your rational little design and apply difficulty to that this can be applied to any game you know starting from your story starting from your big picture view your game is usually the best way to make puzzles or find how to build your puzzle and it always gives you a road map you'll always be able to go

back to this flow and remember why is this puzzle here again what is it achieving what is it teaching so this this road maps a really great thing to think about so start with your story I know these are narrative piece they're not gameplay beats these are narrative beats it's chill performing tests chill escaping the facility chill fighting GLaDOS and yeah we've applied it to kind of our Freytag pyramid which isn't the perfect for narrative structure but it works to show kind of that increase in action and that increase in tension something you can turn that into acts we have our three acts of what our game our gameplay kind of falls onto and we didn't map difficult together that you know you expect when you're exposing things when you're starting the game off it's gonna be easier a little bit meaning and difficulty and difficulty goes up from there and then we have our levels no of course portal knows how many levels it has that's a game that came out but as you develop a game

you're gonna be able to kind of figure out how much you need how much how many meals you need how many pieces you need to get the player up to speed with where they have to be like obviously at the end of Act one the player is pretty competent using the portal and they know how to do it they can they can think with portals so it takes 20 test chambers to do that in this game you know your game might be different but it's good to kind of map like okay how long am i taking on that so now we can kind of see this is a breakout of all those levels I just showed but this is them on a graph organized by steps to complete and remember steps to complete is one of our difficulty dials so although there's a ton of levels in act 1 note how small they are note how few steps they and that's because they're just kind of trying to get them out and teach concepts quickly and cleanly they're not difficult puzzles they're really there

to help teach the player this is how you shoot again this is how you look through a portal this is where a portal goes when you shoot again if you see it kind of has the same shape as our free time pyramid it kind of has that gradual rise a slight decline and on more detailed level you see this pattern repeated do you see a lot of crests that suddenly drop and then gradual crisps crests that suddenly drop over and over again and this is kind of these dips are usually employed after a long or a particularly difficult puzzle and again this is only a steps so they're about their levels in here there were a lot of new concepts are being taught as well adding difficulty so these what I like to call breather puzzles these kind of dips are there more to kind of bolster the players confidence really show them like hey you you solve that thing you did it you you found insight you need to beat a

thing and then really is like reinforcing that usually it's a repetition of beats or just a simpler version of something they've done already so back to our story progression graph let's dig into those those new mechanics and new application dials just for a second so again at the end of x1 you have a pretty comprehensive understanding of how to use portals and we can see that you know fleeing flinging is a pretty advanced technique I think that's the first time in portal a lot of people go whoa now I'm thinking with portals so there's a lot of concepts that have to go into that specifically firing a blue portal and understanding that you can't fire portals into walls remember those are both elements of that puzzle that we explored so those concepts are taught much earlier than chamber 10 chamber two

and seven respectively teach those mechanics and they don't just teach them like right before our puzzle are really complicated we're gonna teach you how to use momentum puzzle they teach them very early and they let the player get really used to them so they almost take them for granted by the time that they get to this new challenge of fleeing themselves across a gap so the flinging puzzle from the beginning of the talk is actually the second of three it kind of sits it's nestled in the middle of chamber ten so the first puzzle that's in that chamber is actually a simple puzzle you you can't cross you can't get to the door because the floor is too high so you solve it like you've been solving every other puzzle in the earlier part of portal which is firing a blue portal and going through it easy and then of course you do gar flinging puzzle where you learn how to fling and then you get this third puzzle which is much harder or it appears much harder you you see the gap

the gap is larger there's you still can't put any portals anywhere and then this time you're you're your orange portal is on the floor so you're actually challenged based on what you learned from where the portal is placed in the previous level you're learning where to put your blue portal to get the same effect so the game gave you an example of how to do something and now they're having you apply that to the level itself and you can get to the exit so here's here's what the puzzles look like in the context of their level with their steps and again on top we have kind of where this lives in our game so we know exactly where this lives in our game so as someone who's analyzing this puzzle they have a really good idea of how difficult it needs to be and what needs to be taught there so here we have you know obviously the steps of the puzzle the blue are the sorry the purple the purple boxes designate a step that's

new to the player so having to find a wall was as an escalation from puzzle one placing the portal on the top rather than on the floor is a new concept the player is learning so we can see like even through our level there's been these steps added there's been new applications and mechanics added to challenge the player more as they go through the level it was interesting about level three also is that if you notice the first three steps in the last three steps in puzzle three are the same they're actually the same steps it's fall through a whole shoot a thing on the portal fall through holstered thing on the portal it's not because it's boring it's because they're teaching the player how it's do what they did again they're giving them confidence it says those breather puzzles I talked about earlier that subsection of puzzle three is really just hey you figured it out you figured out how to put a portal here and you've got here now do it again you got it it's

just bolstering confidence so mapping this stuff on portal is really easy to understand because portal is very linear you can kind of plan for what the player is going to do all players are gonna have kind of the same experience through your game but it's important understand you can also oppose some nonlinear games like braid and what's great to have how braid does this and the witness is it too is that the only thing that's getting the player is their own understanding of a gameplay mechanic or technique and not the game the game's never telling them you can't try something it's always telling them please try this please explore this and find the solution yourself so and they do this really well within world 2 of the hunt you kind of just jump on you jump on enemies to kill them and it opens the door and it's just basic platforming skills but then in world 4 it's the same exact setup but you haven't add a mechanic and if you haven't quite figured out how to kill

enemies with this mechanic at it and there's ago and like rewinds time and brings them back if you jump on them wrong so if you haven't mastered that the game says okay keep continue on you can still complete the game you just can't have a like full completion of the game but you can still move on and continue other puzzles it never says you're stuck here finish this puzzle the way your mom says to finish your broccoli but linear or not um you know it's critical to have a firm grasp on that player um what the puzzle that your player is going to experience finding when it's gonna be encountered or when it might be encountered just so you can ensure that that challenge is correct because again you want that thing that's challenging but still sellable you know if you need arithmetic before you teach algebra you need to have a progression and what you're teaching your players all right so now we're going to go into kind of a step by step of building a puzzle so now we have our elements and

you're going to apply them to building a puzzle so the most important thing is knowing the player's goal because if you don't know the players goal then they won't I can guarantee you so remember that you know it's always about at the heart of a puzzle it's getting a key into a lock it's finding that so message that make sure you're messaging what is your key what is your lock and message the steps to whatever that goal is so a lot of a homogeneous for obsess like we talked about earlier they'll use specific props and messages in their levels they'll repeat props you know that has the very classic like broken rock that says hey this can be a bomb can go on this there's a lot of cracks in this rock blow it up so it's easy to kind of just place that on your level of course it's important to understand what a prop does and where it goes there's a lot of you know it's easy to find a

broken rock and a Zelda environment because it's a fantasy environment you're in a lot of nature it fits really well so you'll see them get a little more creative with things that don't quite fit in nature like the horizontal poles from the grappling-hook example they'll often modify that horizontal pole to look different depending on the temple you're in they'll consistently keep this kind of shape on there it's like the yellow shape on the pole but they'll use ways to modify that to make it fit better in the environment so it's kind of struggled to make a prop that is very clear to the player you understand exactly what you do when you interact with this prop and also making it fit in your world because you don't want it just sticking out like a sore thumb and in adventure games this is even more critical because often you are trying to build a world you're trying to tell the story and you don't want a bunch of repeated props like a bunch of like repeated broken rocks just scattered around your game telling you

to solve a puzzle you can want a very cohesive world that looks like the worldly trying to build so you know our say on next examples all the things that you interact with Sam axe are very obviously interactable especially your a fuse box like it has these lightning bolts coming out of it it's bright it just begs to be looked at you also get this in cameras and so in Walking Dead again we wanted to keep a world consistent we didn't want to just kind of have big arrows pointing out stuff to use it we wanted to make sure that the player was just kind of very subtly guided to things so these are a few screenshots from a puzzle in Walking Dead episode 3 and the story we want to tell was that someone is stealing drugs from your survival group they've left this broken flashlight please figure out how they're doing this and so the narrative was you find these broken shards and then around the corner you

see this X on the wall it's this like signal that you know whoever this perpetrator is has been messaging to somebody that you know they're taking the things like from your survival camp and giving them away but we wanted to make sure that you saw them in that order because if you just kind of found the pink X without any information or context your place gonna look at it and go okay well that's weird neat okay so we wanted to make sure it was tied to our broken flashlight tied to our perpetrator so we made sure that you can you have to look at the broken glass first before you even see the broken ax or the chalk X rather so the bottom screenshots here they're actually the navigation cameras we had in the level and the X's on this wall the wall it's a facing screen left so you can actually see the X because you hide it from the player completely with our cameras to make sure that they're more enticed and

more willing to click on the broken glass so when they do we play it we played actually played a cinematic and that revealed the X it actually should leave and then character himself like making a mental connection between okay I just found the pieces of this flashlight and now I'm finding is really suspicious mark so it kind of preps the player with the narrative to say hey you should be thinking about these two objects together these two objects you just found heavy relationship and we build that kind of with this narrative we also build with cameras every camera in that scene is moving up into the left every single one and that's because we know when you go back to navigation camera on the bottom left here we want you to go there like now go into that corner go look at that wall and continue to move that way and so we're always pushing the player okay make a connection between these two things because there's a narrative there and it's part of the puzzle

if you don't highlight what you want your player to click on you get something like this which is a very classic adventure game pitfall called pixel hunting this is a puzzle in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where you have to find a book on a shelf and you have no clues of what that book looks like you literally have to just click on the books or hover your cursor over the books until something happens and you know at best this is very frustrating they just your players just kind of brute-force clicking around they don't they're not thinking about the connections between the objects that they're looking at they're just kind of clicking mindlessly at worst your player doesn't see that this is a puzzle at all and skips it so it's only important message your clues but also message your puzzle in general so props aren't the only way of course to message your puzzles and I go back to

braid because braid also uses patterns a lot you know there was a pattern in the hunt example that we had earlier that you understand okay I know how to solve this I have a new mechanic in play now but I still know how to salt like what the alternate solution is to this this section and this is another example on braid where there's two platforms kind of moving and there's this one piece of geometry that's moving vertically and it's stopping the horizontal platform but the horizontal platforms needed to get across a bunch of horrible fiery spikes so in the first level it's really just about letting that happen it's about letting that platform move over that danger and using it to get across the gap but then in world this is four or five the ring level suddenly the vertical platform is anything a lot faster and so you're like okay I have seen this before I understand that there's this platform has to go above this vertical platform but how do I do

that this one's moving much faster luckily you have a mechanic that slows things down when it's near it so the player is kind of building this relationship like they're very gradually building a relationship of these things together I also want to talk really briefly about chunking which is a psychological process and taking information chunking it and put it into larger units something that was a big touchdown a telltale was we never put more than around five things that were part of a puzzle on screen ever and it's because humans can only hold so much information we really want them to make those relationships between the clues they're finding so we don't want to just dump a bunch of things on them and have them find them because that's just as bad as clicking a bunch of random books clicking a bunch of stuff just to click on it is just as my list of a task so we want players to be very thoughtful and think about what is next to each other and what they're seeing in a sequence

what's grouped together so it's important so our next big bullet point for when you build a puzzle you know you have your goal even message your goal you've created your challenge the next important thing is giving the players feedback you need to let the player know how they're doing as I play your puzzle and you can do that by rewarding and encouraging your player when they're on the right track you can also do that by communicating to the player when they've hit a dead end these are both very important things so it can be really difficult for a player to know when or when not is a valid option to interact with something especially in adventure games you'll often get the I can't use these things together and it's not great it means okay we didn't have the scope to give you an interaction with this but it's still feedback it's still telling you hey you're on the wrong track you know this is like a dart board full of

axes and knives and they're like Oh obviously Mac should do something with that he's super violent but it's not so those names just says like hey no sorry but it's important otherwise a player might just kind of go down a rabbit hole a rabbit hole no pun intended and then I'm walking dead we actually solved this by kind of actually restricting the amount of verbs a player could even use you know Lee is a whole inventory he has you know there's two items in this inventory right now he normally can look at stuff but when he's a zombie he only can shoot it and that makes sense because if you saw a zombie and you had a gun that's probably what you're going to do you know it's a lot of content and a lot of time and a lot of steps that a player has to go through to kind of look at a full verb option we all go what if I look at the zombie what if I use my clipboard on the zombie you know it's a lot faster it's a lot more meaningful in the moment to just say you probably want

to shoot the zombie leaves pretty afraid right now of the zombie then when you find out the zombie is dead we give you back your verbs like an exam and look at because they're relevant again I've gone from action mode from I'm scared of something to okay now it's time to figure out what's happening it's time for me to sit and and look at the scene and understand what's happening here another important thing to remember when building a puzzle is to be kind just be kind to your player again your it's a contract of challenging them but then not making things impossible repetition isn't fun making a play or replay something over and over again because they failed isn't fun and checking your still checks and what I mean by that is you know if you have a verb basic I got more system in for a bass game you have a lot of physics in your game the players challenge to move through it that's good but make sure that those skill checks are informed to make sure they're not

making the player repeat a lot of things I was just talking to a friend of mine there's this forsaken fortress and a Widowmaker and I hated it I stopped playing winwaker i didn't play winwaker for a long time because i played this level and it has a ton of skill checks where you can fall and when you fall you have to repeat the entire level over again and to be clear I love winwaker zelda great thumbs up but man that killed it like and think of how good winwaker is but just having to repeat those puzzles over and over again their puzzles so you have a dumb in solution you've found the dumb in the strategy you know this you know what you're doing if you know what you're doing but you can't execute it it's extremely frustrating and to go out the portal again they do a great job with us because whenever you fail in portal they either put you back very close to where you fail so you kind of learning okay this is the last place I was before I screwed everything up I can now think

about that so the deaths in portal are the failures in portal are also teaching the player hey you were you were right up to this point so try again you know what you did was wrong I know try different solution last thing when building a puzzle is integrate your story into your puzzle and that's why it's so important to have that macro chart that progression flow of your game because when you have your story mapped out and you'll understand where your story is in your puzzle where it is in your game you can always go there for inspiration the slide of the picture on the left here is from a game called quadrilateral cowboy or you're actually hacking and when you're hacking in quadrilateral cowboy you're moving through a level you're actually getting like take your laptop out and hack and like open a door and it's very integrated in the game it's a part of the story you are you feel like you're the secret agent hacker who's opening things whereas in BioShock you're just

playing pipe dream if you played Bioshock it's not about playing pipe dream so the hacking puzzles in that game are a lot weaker because they're not integrated in this story there's kind of this weird minigame that happens so I always look at your story and then remember the golden rule always be kind of your players let them give them a challenge but given the materials they need to complete that challenge if you ever watched Sherlock Holmes it always cracks me up when people say oh you can follow along Sherlock Holmes and solve the crimes of him because you can't he has a ton of information that you don't have he's just saying well didn't she notice that his hand is four calluses on he's a tennis player and the specific shoeprints found is a Nike tennis boot you know this is information you didn't have and so you know when you make your players feel like Watson just kind of staring at Sherlock it doesn't feel good

so remember puzzles are fun for the player not the designer don't get super excited about feeling clever let's make a good experience so lastly I want somewhat troubleshooting because as I said you know difficulty among other things it's really difficult to get right you know even with all these tips it's going to take a lot of iteration a lot of considerations to get your puzzle to feel good and do exactly what you want it to do and you do that with user testing and you do that as much as you can seriously you do it as much as you can there's no excuse for not getting user testing it's so important to capture as much as your testers thinking process as possible because that's going to really tell you if your difficulty levels are appropriate or not there was a great post-mortem for missed and GDC 2013 though I definitely recommend checking out because Robin Miller Robin Miller was talking about how even before Myst

was a game even before they were able to like throw it on a hyper card stack and make it a thing they were doing it D&D style they would actually describe to the player this is what you see can you solve this and you know as you know mist is very open and it is allowed to be that way because they made they did so much testing with here as literally as open we can get here is a D&D role-playing game can you solve this puzzle and then later in their testing process when they did has something implemented they actually would always test with two people they'd usually test with couples and that was because they liked to talk to each other so you know obviously you know puzzle games are very heady we get in our own heads and we're solving them but Moore's along with another person we're talking a lot more about what we're thinking and I bet our thought process is and it's a really great way to see what a player is thinking and having them argue for a solution is gonna give you a lot more information than just kind of staring at the screen and blinking a lot oh but yeah so always know what your

players get stuck and then yeah look at this I next is coming like a self-check to examine and why they're getting stuck so if your player says that was too easy which is very rare but you'll get it did you give them a chance to solve it themselves did you just feed them answer and if they think it's too easy you know maybe you already talked that concept before maybe that mechanic was already really effectively tutorial eyes and you're kind of getting repetitious so look back at your chart and say okay maybe I don't need as much tutorials ation as I thought they might also mean that it was just luck and key it was very obvious there weren't enough steps between your lock and your key to find those things there weren't enough variations in your verbs and applications and you guys ever played Pokemon they have the cut mechanic and at first you're like I can't break these bushes I have to cut down these bushes how do I do that you learn cut and you can cut down bushes that's all you can ever do it never escalates so that it's

always just there's no thinking anymore just like okay I've been taking my Ratatat and I could have a bush down okay it's not thinking it's just lock and key it never involves past that door so too hard which is lot more common you'll get a lot more to hards and just ask yourself like was it did I give information to solve this puzzle how long ago did I give that information ago because it might just be not relevant to the player anymore and can they get back to it like is it lost forever can they reference that information again and then of course is the goal clear to the player and this is looking at your level layout living at your visuals making sure your path is clear all those stuff that you know a level designer does when just making things obvious goals and then check your dials are there too many steps in your puzzle this is very very common I see us all the time people just put too many stuff in their puzzles because again it feels clever or they've been playing their own game like a thousand times they're like well obviously you know these hundred stuff is like horrible

Rube Goldberg machine of choice this puzzle being solved but you know on first blush a lot of players aren't going to give up and again check your mechanics are you teaching them well are you changing the context of a mechanic and this is let's talk about consistency you know it's great to make new applications mechanics it's great to change them but if that new way is unintuitive or hasn't been realized the players going to have a hard time with it so your golden rules take a picture of this when it's done it's going to come in as bullets a good puzzle challenge the player without hand-holding or being unfair fun for the player not the designer don't be Sherlock Holmes puzzles combine a game's theme and mechanics and rely on the consistency at each to make sense you know consistency is your friend and puzzles and look at your puzzle the context of the game as a whole so judges difficulty it's the best way to figure out if your puzzles do anything it's one there's one work watch others play your

puzzle and check for assumptions you may have made you know we're all different human beings are all different people or from different cultures they'll think differently and that's the fun of puzzle design is it you really get to watch people think and watch people work through problems and learn new things and that's my talk this talk was really a two hours long so I encourage you guys to also take a picture of this slide and just check out some of these really great articles you know lots of rational level design stuff some great CDC talks from past years all good stuff and then I think how much time I got it in five yeah nothing like a couple of questions yeah if you didn't want his questions feel free to come up to the mics over there and thank you everybody

I'd like to hear your thoughts on dynamic difficulty from the point of view of I'm sure everybody in this room has hit a puzzle anyway and literally walked away from the games and I'm gonna up there many times and but this is kinda like two ways some games do kind of like you know the voice comes on and gives you a hint that some games do it too early this ones where you're walking through and you're thinking okay I'm just gonna end up going on look at this and it's a bit too much of a giveaway but I mean from the point of view of are we able yet really to have a puzzle and you try something and it doesn't work and you try something else if it's a week and not just to give away a hint or there's the key but to dynamically change the puzzle because it's like you've detected that the person's tried five things and it hasn't worked and we don't want them to give up we want to keep playing yeah so a lot of games have tried this you know to his systems I

think some hidden systems of garbage some hints Simpsons are just really bad because they do just tell you go there's the key go do it what are you doing you idiot and yeah that's always bad because it's still that same problem I'm still letting the player solve themselves it's the designer kind of giving up on you it's your teacher just saying just copy my answers just go it's that same feeling so I think there are good hit systems up there actually um missed had a really good hint system a not miss or miss guru the third one yeah they and it was rid us because they wrote them well they were very careful in their language they were careful and how they gave them and eventually they got pretty on the nose but there were a lot of them and you know granted that's a lot of content but there was a lot to give them I've also seen a diamond so we're describing I think of like a dynamic puzzle changing you have also seen that in like Silent Hill I think had that and the the problem the problem I see with that is that you're suddenly what Silent Hill

did was they had easy medium hard and when you played that game on those different difficulties the puzzles actually change and they they use the dials we talked about like often the hard puzzles had more steps or more connections you had to make but it's a lot of content because they literally made three puzzles forever puzzle so I think that's a big barrier is just that amount of content you have to make you're suddenly tripling your scoop because there is you know puzzles are so tightly interwoven it's tough to kind of get it's such a just kind of take away or put in steps to add difficulty so so you think it's too much of a design it would just be too much of a challenge for that I I think it's a great challenge to try I think it's a good design challenge I think the scope is where you're gonna run into trouble but maybe a ton of money there you got one more I think we have two minutes left in this session I was going to break out to the panel yeah I'd like to

hear your thoughts on like how it can be hard to teach somebody something during an intense moment like how it's probably easier when there things are very calm and you have your own but if you're like during an FPS or a more actually game like how to teach the player even though he's in an intense or her she is in an intense moment like if there's actually a lot of action going on any advice on how to teach players things if it's supposed to be high-intensity game how do you teach players or have puzzles today well I think even in a high intensity game you are gonna have points of low intensity like if your games only high tension it's just gonna feel like you're getting hit all the time and you're just gonna get become numb so there is definitely finding those points of low intensity and using those just to like kind of bolster the player to teach them those basics it's great when you can say hey you learn some basics and now you're in a more tense moment you're

you know difficulties added through a time a timing element or something like that but yeah I think I think it's more just like kind of making sure the player again has that tool set they need it they have that knowledge in there and then when they're confronted with this stress will pitch to a situation you can ask them to do something like that you can ask them to test what they know or challenge themselves in some way but I think it's really just that's how much more work you're gonna have to do to really scaffold their knowledge and skills does that answer your question no sodium generally just try to avoid teaching players too much new stuff during the test moment so then just have them apply that knowledge in a different way rather yeah I think so because the because you're actually you know that's a new setting I'm suddenly I suddenly have a lot more things to think about so that's all new information new stuff that that into the difficulty so there's not really much more you need to do from there you know you're already giving them something stressful to deal with