The Art of Puzzle Design | How Game Designers Explore Ideas and Themes with Puzzles and Problems
Channel: The Game Overanalyser
Date: 2019-10-24

This Video Explores the Art of Puzzle Design, and how game designers explore ideas and themes using both puzzles and problems. Puzzle design is often viewed as an arcane art only a few are privy to, but in this essay, we explore the many design philosophies creators have employed to manufacture them. What we find is there are as many ways to make a puzzle as there are puzzles themselves, and this pluralism feeds into what the purpose of puzzles have been and are in our society today. 

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We explore games as varied as The Witness, braid, Baba is You, Infinifactory, Stephens sausage roll and fez to support the idea that puzzle are ultimately the aesthetic form of thought itself. 

Sources

Books
- The Puzzle Instinct Marcel Danesi
- Bob Bates  -On game design
- Infinite Powers Steven Strogatz
- Is God a programmer? Geoff Simons

Videos 

-Gdc talk  Solving Puzzle Design  Jolie Menzel
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xBJwrm9C8w

- Empuzzlement  Blow, droquen, Ten Bosche
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ul_ZfzfHRek

-Designing to reveal the nature of the universe
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGSeLSmOALU

-The Arcane art of puzzle dependency diagrams
https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1017978/The-Arcane-Art-of-Puzzle

-Open ended puzzle design at zachtronics
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4uH1ynH3Rs

- Breaking Conventions with the legend of zelda 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyMsF31NdNc&t=10s

-Making Baba is you
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eTFea_UZcc

-Bob Bates  Designing the puzzle
http://www.lucasstyle.com/tutorials/Designing_The_Puzzle.pdf 

- A look back at fezs Black Monolith
https://kotaku.com/a-look-back-at-fezs-unsolvable-black-monolith-puzzle-1794358854

- Designing Baba is yous rule wrtiing system 
https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/342113/Designing_Baba_is_Yous_delightfully_innovative_rulewriting_system.php

-How to make a good puzzle
https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/TomHermans/20180829/325469/How_to_make_a_good_puzzle__An_explorable_explanation.php

Gdc hearts and minds
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrO5IGoPgcw