Designing Puzzles?

My next game is going to be a puzzle game (of the Portal/Zelda variety, not the Bejewled variety). I've been having a really rough time coming up with interesting puzzle elements that combine in interesting ways, though. Do I start by thinking of an interesting solution or maneuver that the player has to do? Or do I start with the goal and work backwards, adding obstacles? Is it a good idea to practice by making levels for existing puzzle games (Portal 2 has a really easy-to-use level editor, for example)?

 

That's a tough one.
Puzzle design is really, really hard to get right. Nobody likes hours of fetch-quests.

The first important question is whether this is a puzzlegame or not. Is this a game like Amnesia The Dark Descent that just happens to contain puzzles, or is it a game like Poral where the puzzles are the central element of the game?

If it's the latter, a puzzlegame, try to summarize the central puzzle-mechanic as short as possible.
Portal: Portals
Antichamber: Non-euclidean geometry
That one game I forgot the name of: Forced perspective

If you aren't able to summarize the central mechanic like this, you can't continue.
You need this since you should build the game around it, rather than start to create a game and then try to crowbar in some puzzles later.

So yeah. What's the central mechanic of your game?

 

One thing I think to consider that makes something a puzzle, is enforcing some kind of a limitation. You have to put the user's mind into a state where it APPEARS that `freedom` is obscure and that something has to be figured out or seen in a different perspective in order to `see` the solution. It usually requires some kind of a shift in perception, to look at the situation in a different way, and it's the transition from being `puzzled` to `solving` it that is the enjoyable part. e.g. what if you limit movement in a certain direction, or only provide the option to carry one key at a time but are confronted with multiple doors, or need to do something in a certain sequence, etc.

 

If I remember correctly one user who was working on a really good looking puzzle game (with robots) wrote that's pretty much the way he works, e.g. setting up a simple puzzle and adding obstacles to block the easiest solutions from there.

Portal did a similar thing with their advanced puzzle rooms where the previous solution from the main game didn't work because there now was a wall in your way, or walls were suddenly made of the non-Portal-y kind. Infact, maybe you might want to install Portal 2 and create a puzzle in its (rather great) editor, trying to make it more and more hard to solve.

 

This all seems like good advice to me. But keep in mind that if you are doing something Zelda-ish, then there really is no central puzzle mechanic; puzzles are embedded in the world, and expected to come in great variety. In fact I think the best puzzles look like they're natural obstacles you might actually face in that world, rather than something a devious game designer has built specifically to give you a hard time.

This is hard to do, of course.

But the above advice still applies: think about what elements you have in your world (doors, levers, keys, NPCs, items, gems, etc.), and how these might affect each other (switches open doors, NPCs give/receive items, etc.). Then, see how these can be combined in natural ways to make a simple challenge more challenging. You need to get through the door? It's locked; now you need to find the key. Key is behind a grate, and you can't reach it; now you need to open the grate. OK, so who knows how to open the grate? Etc.

NPCs offer an especially rich source of "natural" puzzles because they can have story and interactions. I agree with @TheSniperFan that you don't want to just make a bunch of fetch-quests (and too many games fall back on that). So think people: what sort of problems do people have? Maybe a wife is mad at her husband. Why? Erm, maybe she thinks he's been flirting with the local barmaid. OK, what can you do about that? I dunno, maybe prove that the local barmaid is not interested in men... I'm just spitballing here, but you see how this sort of thinking might lead to puzzles that involve running around and actually using NPC dialog for something other than "gimme the next quest" and "I finished the quest, gimme the reward."

 

I feel like to design a good puzzle, you have to start from the other end: what is a mechanic you want in your game?

If you do something like the Magic Hammer in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, you can create a 'lights-out' based peg maze, where smacking down one peg pushes the others up. The challenge of the puzzle is for the user to reason out what pegs alter other pegs, but the hammer gives it a reason to be.

In my current project, the character's abilities involve summoning objects for defensive purposes. One of her things she can summon is a block that obeys physics. There's all sorts of things that a simple, magically-induced block can do - cover a spike, press down a remote switch until the block despawns, redirect enemy pathing such that they activate something the block can't, redirect enemy pathing such that they prevent another enemy from being a problem...

I feel like with video game puzzles, designing and iterating the tool allows you to more easily come up with challenges. Am I entirely crazy in thinking like this?

 

Thanks for the advice, guys! You've given me a lot to think about...

I'll share a bit more about the game, too. The controls are like an RTS, where you have multiple units and can command them to move and do things. The core mechanic is that you can capture (or convert) a unit and it will join your side and you can command it. Sometimes a unit being captured will fight back, locking it into a stalemate with your unit until a third party comes along (one of your units or an NPC) and breaks the tie.

However, this is really just a combat system (and a pretty lopsided one at that - I originally designed this as a multiplayer game until I realized the snowball effect would be too extreme). My idea for the puzzle part of the game is that each unit has a special ability, and you have to combine those abilities to complete the objective of the level. Some of those abilities could be (oh - this is important, the game is set inside a computer system):

• Transfer data from place to place
• Operate a "program" structure which causes something to happen in the world [vagueness alert]
• Automatically win capture stalemates
• Hack through locked barriers, given enough time

As for the goals or obstacles... I have no idea what those might be.

 

When designing a puzzle, focus on introducing mechanics before introducing complex puzzles. Allow the player to feel some satisfaction then throw more difficult things at them.

 

I'd say, take a bit of inspiration from that same Zelda game, and other
adventure games like Uncharted. Uncharted 3 and 4 had some really
interesting puzzles.
But in the end, do your own thing and make your own unique puzzles
that'll fit in your game world.