Level Design Workshop Solving Puzzle Design

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All right.

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Good morning, everybody.

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Thanks Joel for the introduction.

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This is all the design in a day and this is a talk, a topic that's near and dear to my heart.

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Solving puzzle design.

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A bit of a background on me.

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I began my career at Telltale Games as a cinematic artist and a designer, and now I'm a level designer
at Ubisoft Studio SF, just around the corner on the New South Park RPG The Fractured ********.

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Think about it.

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So why puzzles?

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I love puzzles because designing a good puzzle means you're combining tons of different concepts in
game design altogether to make a really cool unit of game, a good game nugget.

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So you have your mechanics, your level design, your narrative, balancing your difficulty progression.

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These are all things that go into puzzles that make a puzzle great, a great experience for a player.

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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.

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And then we're going to 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.

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So let's start off with what is a puzzle.

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So puzzles are kind of hard to define.

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Again, we have the level design domain to kind of work within, but in general, good.

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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.

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And now this usually is not a good thing.

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In game design, you want a player to be able to choose what they want to do.

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You want them to have decisions they can make, but you can still have that with a dominant strategy.

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And that's because puzzles are games with one solution.

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That's what they are inherently.

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And that's because while games are played to win, puzzles are played to find a solution.

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At their very heart, they are about finding that strategy.

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So your gameplay finds in the challenge of getting that dominant strategy nailed down South.

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A puzzle is a challenge, but it's not a competitive challenge.

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It's the players stopping and thinking about a challenge that you as the designer have given them.
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You know, adventure games are a great example of this.

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This is Grim Fandango.

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You're going to, you know, you're you're playing a detective.

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So it's all about finding clues, figuring out who you need to talk to next, learning about the world and
applying that.

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You're always stopping and thinking the way a detective would.

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I also have up here Angry Birds.

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Now, Angry Birds is also a puzzle game because if you think about it, there is a ideal way to destroy all
the pigs in their home that's messaged with like the kind of the star system.

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There is a dominant ideal way, a most efficient way.

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Using the birds you have to solve the puzzle of breaking a bunch of pigs homes.

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So what makes a puzzle good?

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Does anyone know?

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Well, fun is important to a puzzle being good, and it's all but that fun should come from the
challenge.

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And that challenge happens when the player feels a sense of trust and respect from the designer.

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Now, how do you get that trust and respect?
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You invite the player to find a solution.

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You don't hand them one, you let them try to find it themselves.

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But you also make sure that solution is attainable.

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You don't challenge, you don't be the awful GM who just kills all your players.

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You're always letting them at least get out of the situation by their own merit.

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And so if you do achieve that, the player has a sense of accomplishment, of getting through
something themselves.

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So thinking about it that way, it's players learning how to get out of a situation.

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Learning is fun, and learning is fun because knowledge is power, you know, Games are all about
feeling powerful in your surroundings or well equipped to handle a situation, and so providing
knowledge that provides power.

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And you know, when you're in a situation where you're stopping and thinking about a puzzle, feeling
powerful means knowing how to solve it.

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So this is a talk that was at GDC last year.

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It's called precision of emotion, a new kind of fun approach.

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And this was given by a woman named Erin Hoffman.

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And her theory on fun is that the search for knowledge that a player undergoes is this emotional
journey by which they achieve mastery.

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Mastery of a situation, of a concept of a puzzle and this emot.
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And so she called this emotion of finding mastery Sophia.

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So an emotion of mastery.

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And a lot of it's actually built on Jean Puget's cognitive development studies from the mid 20th
century.

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So it's all about how humans find knowledge and how they're engaged in finding knowledge.

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So this is, this is a chart kind of I keep going on to like this is a chart illustrating kind of what Hoffman
calls the Sophia loop, which is the this emotional journey one goes through, a player goes through
when they're solving a puzzle going through a game.

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So at first, the player is convent by fear.

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They have an absence of skill.

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They don't know what to do.

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They're afraid.

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And then they go through this kind of cycle of emotions.

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They all fall under the general idea of surprise or being surprised.

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But you know, all things that go into speculating, being curious, discovering something, finding
insight.

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And then when that all comes together, and they do find a solution, they have, They experience
happiness.

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They have a happiness of a mastery, the Sophia feeling.
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And in 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.

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So this loop, if you guys have played The Witness, I think we all feel this a lot when we play The
Witness.

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You know, you see this like Lisa Frank nightmare and you're like, what do I do about this puzzle?

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I have no idea how to solve this.

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But then you, you know, you think back to the puzzles that you learn and you're like, OK, well, I know I
need to go from A to BI know.

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I know how to solve this puzzle.

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So you go through this kind of cycle of surprise, of discovery and then come out victorious.

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Another an example I'll walk through because I want to spoil the Witness is this is the flinging puzzle
from Portal One.

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So this this puzzle comes in about midway through Actimanov Portal, about like level 10.

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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.

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And you have an easy time going across that gap that you couldn't before.

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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 anywhere to put your portals around.

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You can't cross that gap the way you've been crossing gaps for the first 10 levels of this game.
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So you feel fear.

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How do I get across here?

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A gun doesn't work, but you have the knowledge of the game.

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So you can kind of say, OK, well, I know orange portals are usually by the goal, so this orange puzzle
might be near the goal.

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And then you look below you in the pit, in the pit you're trying to cross and you're like, well, that I can
put a portal on that.

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That's cool.

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And then you realize, oh, the exit's there.

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That's how I get across.

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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.

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I know why that portal was where it is.

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I know what to do.

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So now let's start digging into puzzles and talking about what they're made of.

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So the elements of a puzzle.

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So at the core of puzzles, you're always basically finding a key that goes into a lock.
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And sometimes the puzzle's finding the key, sometimes it's finding the lock, sometimes it's a
combination of both.

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Like any game, puzzles are this creative combination of mechanics and theme.

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In puzzles, I like to break mechanics out into verbs.

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So specifically mechanics that the player can use, things that the player can do in their level.

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So on the theme 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 and a context for your puzzles and what
they can do in it.

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A strong narrative and a puzzle gives the player a scaffold onto 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.

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You're not throwing a Rubik's Cube in their face and stop telling solve it.

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You're disguising it in some way.

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It turns pressing some buttons, Simon Says style, into a thing I did in the game, a story I can tell about
what I achieved while I was playing.

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So I want to focus on verbs.

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I thought long and hard because in level design you kind of have these two camps of types of player
verbs.

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So I want to define those and talk about how they differ.

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So I have two games up here, Legend of Zelda, Wind Waker and Sam and Max Hit the Road which are
two very different games and a kind of hard time defining these verbs.
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But I kind of landed on homogeneous verbs, the systems based verbs and then heterogeneous verbs,
context based verbs.

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So you have homogeneous verbs with this grounding and systemic actions that the player does just
while playing the game.

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When you're using a homogeneous game verb, the action has a very specific outcome that the player
can anticipate will happen.

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The meat of that puzzle is figuring out how to apply the verbs to specific problems, either alone or in
combination.

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So here we have the grappling hook from Winwaker.

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You can always target a horizontal pull like the one up there, and it will have link shoot as grappling
hook and create a rope bridge or a rope swing rather to swing across gaps.

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Then that gets expanded upon.

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You later see additional horizontal poles, and while they still even still count on them to create rope
swings, they also might do things like pull switches.

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The rope swings might be in large, they might create larger gaps, there might be more challenging
things around them, but the player can always count on.

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If I target horizontal pole with my grappling hook, I'm probably going to create a rope and I'm
probably going to swing across some kind of gap in some way.

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And then with heterogeneous verbs.

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This mostly applies to your classic adventure game.

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The players verbs are usually examine, get more information on a thing, or use a thing on another
thing.

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So in this example we have Sam and Max, and Max is the rabbit if anyone doesn't know that.

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So the player plays as Sam, and in Sam and Max in general, Max likes violence.

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Max likes to do bad things, he likes to do violent things.

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So if the player needs to do something violent, they know they can use Max on that thing.

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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 his stomach.

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And then on 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.

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So once you find the fuse box with the flashlight, you can take Max and use them on the fuse box.

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And Sam actually dunks him in the water and uses him to short out the fuse box.

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So those are two really different things.

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Using Max isn't really predictable.

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You have a theme.

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Your theme is telling you, oh, thematically, I use Max.

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He's going to do something violent, but it's not something systemic that I can count on.

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It's always very special case, very per situation, and that gives it a lot of flexibility.
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You know, San Max is based on this comic book.

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So when you play the San Max games, you feel like you're just playing the comic book, dunking Max
in the water and shortening out a circuit is a story beam.

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You know, it's something they can do.

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But yeah, the importance, you know, not either verb you have, whatever type of verb you have, it's
that consistency that's important.

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But whether it comes from systems or whether it comes from narrative, just keeping it consistent
world to your for your player, something that they can hook onto so that they understand how your
world works is what's important.

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Now I want to dive into difficulty.

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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.

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So 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.

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It's the absolute hardest thing to get right in puzzles, hands down.

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Getting that balance is always difficult and and we'll go into that like a little bit later on the talk when
we start more about building and troubleshooting puzzles.

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And one more thing I'm going to illustrate, I have three steps for difficulty I want to talk about.

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They're Witness spoilers, so if you haven't played The Witness or don't want to be spoiled, turn
around.
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So the first aspect of a puzzle that you can tweak to make a puzzle easier or harder is how many steps
it takes to solve the puzzle or in games are the states.

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The puzzle state of being solved isn't super explicit.

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It's the amount of steps and amount of time that passes before the player receives feedback, either
positive or negative, about how they've interacted with the puzzle.

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So the tutorial, Pains, and The Witness are a great example of this.

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They feel they feel much easier because you're being guided through each step of the puzzle.

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You're getting feedback every time you learn even a nuanced new concept of the puzzle that you're
trying to solve.

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And they get progressively harder because they add complications, but they aren't overwhelming
because you've been LED into them very gradually in succession.

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And then you have something else.

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This puzzle on the top, you know, it's kind of a clue, but you have no immediate application to it.

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You don't really, you can't look around and understand what this clue means.

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So inherently, that puzzle's going to be a little harder for the player because, you know, even though
the solution's very explicit, you know, it's very obviously a puzzle that you're solving, the player still
has to kind of keep that in their mind.

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They have to travel to that destination.

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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.
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So that gap of time, those different steps really add to the difficulty of a puzzle.

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So the next kind of dial you have for puzzle difficulty is revealing new mechanics or revealing new
information.

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So the first panel here on the left, that's the first puzzle of The Witness.

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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.

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And the middle puzzle complicates a little bit.

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It says, hey, you can make wrong turns sometimes if you go to a dead end, you haven't completed the
puzzle.

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It also teaches you things like you can't loop around, you can't, the path cannot touch itself.

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And then the last puzzle takes all of that and applies it to another mechanic.

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It adds a new mechanic of these colored dots and the player has to discover how to kind of deal with
those different dots and learn what they mean.

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And then our third dial is kind of related.

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It's new applications of those mechanics or information.

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So same mechanics, same info, but you're kind of applying it in a different way or finding it in a
different way than you're used to.

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So in this example, you know up till now you most of the puzzles that you've been solving have been,
the solutions have been on the panels themselves.
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But in this example, the solution to the panel is not on the panel, it's above you.

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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, OK, I can now
get information from about panels from outside.

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So we have oh so witness spoilers are done if anyone was hiding.

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So our difficulty dials steps to solve new mechanics information, new applications of mechanics.

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That's half of the puzzle.

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The puzzle, no pun intended.

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So you're not going to find the appropriate level of difficulty just using these.

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You can't do that in the vacuum.

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You have two forces acting on your designs that are going to influence the difficulty as well.

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Difficulty considerations.

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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.

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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.

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You may be making a more narrative focused game and you don't want the puzzles to be too hard.

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You don't want the player stuck.
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You don't want, you want and you want many players to be able to play this game and be very want
the game to be very accessible to them.

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So you might have a difficulty that's a little lower than you might want or think that you want and
then but if you then your game is more challenge focused.

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If your game, the point of your game is to challenge, if it is to do game play.

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If it's for an audience that, you know, wants that challenge, wants to solve puzzles, then yeah, your
difficulty is going to go a little bit higher.

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And then for progression, we're going to break out into rational puzzle design.

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What rational puzzle design or well, rational design in general, is introducing concepts in an orderly
fashion and preserving your macro flow.

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What does that mean?

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Macro flow sounds like a rap name.

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And what that means really is just looking at your game from top to bottom.

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It means understanding everything that you're making for your game.

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Where does it go in your game and when does the player experience it or when can they experience
it?

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So it's really taking your game, breaking it out into a piece of your game, finding the level it's in and
finding your puzzle.

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This is our Portal puzzle.

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We know it's an act, it's 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.

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So I'm going to do like a pretty deep dive onto with using this the portal puzzle as a case study.

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Just kind of go into a deep dive of how you can kind of break a puzzle or find a puzzle where a puzzle
lives in your rational level design and apply difficulty to that.

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This can be applied to any game you know starting from your story starting from your big picture.

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Video game is usually the best way to make puzzles or find how to build your puzzle and it always
gives you a road map.

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You'll always be able to go back to this flow and remember why is this puzzle here again?

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What is it achieving?

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What is it teaching?

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So this this road map's a really great thing to think about.

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So start with your story.

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I know these are narrative beats.

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They're not gameplay beats.

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These are narrative beats.

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It's chill performing tests, chill escaping the facility, chill fighting Glados.

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And yeah, we've applied it to kind of our our fray tag pyramid, which isn't the perfect narrative
structure, but it works to show kind of that increase in action and that increase in tension.

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So we can turn that into acts.

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We have our three acts of what our game, our game play kind of falls onto and we can map difficulty
of that.

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You know, you expect when you're exposing things when you're starting the game off, it's going to be
easier, a little bit medium difficulty and the difficulty goes up from there.

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And then we have our levels.

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Now of course, Portal knows how many levels it has because it's a game that came out.

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But as you develop a game, you're going to be able to kind of figure out how much you need, how
much how many meals do you need or how many pieces you need to get the player up to speed with
where they have to be.

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Like obviously at the end of act one, the player is pretty competent at using the portal gun.

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They know how to do it.

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They can, they can think with portals.

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So it takes 20 test chambers to do that in this game.

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You know, your game might be different, but it's good to kind of map like, OK, how long am I taking
on that?

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So now we can kind of see this is a breakout of all those levels I just showed.

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But this is then on a graph organized by steps to complete.
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And remember, steps to complete is one of our difficulty dials.

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So although there's a ton of levels in act one, note how small they are, note how few steps they take.

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And that's because they're just kind of trying to get them out and teach concepts quickly and cleanly.

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They're not difficult puzzles.

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They're really there to help teach the player.

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This is how you shoot a gun.

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This is how you walk through a portal.

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This is where a portal goes when you shoot a gun.

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And if you see it kind of has the same shape as our freetag pyramid, it kind of has that gradual rise, a
slight decline, and on a more detailed level, you see this pattern repeated.

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You see a lot of crests that suddenly drop and then gradual crests, crests that suddenly drop over and
over again.

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And this is kind of these dips are usually employed after a long or a particularly difficult puzzle.

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And again this is only a steps.

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So there are there are levels in here.

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There are a lot of new concepts that are being taught as well adding difficulty.

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So these, what I like to call breather puzzles, these kind of dips, are there more to kind of bolster the
player's confidence, really show them like, hey, you, you solved that thing, you did it, you you found
insight you need to beat a thing.

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And then really it's like reinforcing that usually it's a repetition of beats or just a simpler version of
something they've done already.

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So back to our story progression graph, let's dig into those, those new mechanics and new application
dials, just for a second.

23:20
So again, at the end of Act one, you have a pretty comprehensive understanding of how to use
portals.

23:28
And we can see that, you know, flinging.

23:30
Flinging is a pretty advanced technique.

23:32
I think that's the first time in Portal.

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A lot of people go, whoa, now I'm thinking with portals.

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So there's a lot of concepts that have to go into that, specifically firing a blue portal, understanding
that you can't fire portals into walls.

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Remember, those are both elements of that puzzle that we explored.

23:54
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.

24:08
We're going to teach you how to use Momentum puzzle.

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They teach them very early and they let the player get really used to them.

24:13
So they almost take them for granted by the time that they get to this new challenge of fleeing
themselves across a gap.

24:23
So the flinging puzzle from the beginning of the talk is actually the second of three.

24:29
It kind of sits.

24:29
It's nestled in the middle of chamber 10.

24:33
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.

24:42
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.

24:51
And then of course you do our flinging puzzle where you learn how to fling and then you get this
third puzzle, which is much harder or it appears much harder.

24:59
You you see the gap, the gap is larger, there's you still can't put any portals anywhere.

25:05
And then this time your your, your orange portal is on the floor.

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So you're actually challenged based on what you learned from where the portal was placed in the
previous level.

25:16
You're learning where to put your blue portal to get the same effect.

25:19
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.

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So here's here's what the puzzles look like in the context of their level, with their steps.

25:39
And again on top, we have kind of where this lives in our game, so we know exactly where this lives in
our game.
25:44
So as someone who's analysing this puzzle, they have a really good idea of how difficult it needs to be
and what needs to be taught there.

25:51
So here we have, you know, obviously the steps of the puzzle, the blue or the sorry, the purple.

25:58
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.

26:10
Placing the portal on the top rather than on the floor is a new concept The player is learning.

26:17
So we can see, like even through our level, there's been these steps added, There's been new
applications of mechanics added to challenge the player more as they go through the level.

26:28
And what's interesting about Level 3 also is that if you notice the first three steps and the last three
steps in puzzle three are the same, they're actually the same steps.

26:37
It's fall through a hole, shoot a thing on the portal, fall through a hole, shoot a thing on the portal.

26:40
And it's not because it's boring, it's because they're teaching the player how to do what they did
again, and they're giving them confidence.

26:48
It's those breather puzzles I talked about earlier, that subsection of Puzzle 3 is really just, hey, you
figured it out.

26:54
You figured out how to put a Portal here, and you've got here.

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Now do it again.

26:59
You got it.

27:00
Just bolstering confidence.
27:02
So mapping the stuff on Portal is really easy to understand because Portal is very linear.

27:09
You can kind of plan for what the player is going to do.

27:11
All players are going to have kind of the same experience through your game, but it's important to
understand you can also apply this to non linear games like Braid and with Grade.

27:22
How How Braid does this and the witnesses it too is that the only thing that's gaming the player is
their own understanding of a gameplay mechanic or technique and not the game.

27:32
The game's never telling them they can't try something.

27:35
It's always telling them please try this, please explore this and find the solution yourself.

27:41
So and they do this really well with in world two of the Hunt you kind of just jump on.

27:47
You jump on enemies to kill them and it opens the door and it's just basic platforming skills.

27:52
But then in world four it's the same exact set up but you have an added mechanic and if you haven't
quite figured out how to kill enemies with this mechanic added there's like a like rewinds time and
brings them back if you jump on them wrong.

28:07
So if you haven't mastered that, the game says OK keep continue on.

28:11
You can still complete the game.

28:12
You just can't have a like full completion of the game, but you can still move on and continue other
puzzles.

28:17
It never says you're stuck here.

28:19
Finish this puzzle the way your mom says to finish your broccoli.
28:26
But linear or not, you know it's critical to have a firm grasp on when that player, on what the puzzle
that your player is going to experience finding, when it's going to be encountered or when it might be
encountered.

28:38
Just so you can ensure that that challenge is correct.

28:41
Because again, you want that thing that's challenging but still solvable.

28:47
You know, you need arithmetic before you teach algebra.

28:49
You need to have a progression in what you're teaching your players.

28:53
All right.

28:55
So now we're going to go into kind of a step by step of building a puzzle.

29:00
So now we have our elements and we're going to apply them to building a puzzle.

29:05
So the most important thing is knowing the player's goal.

29:08
Because if you don't know the player's goal, then they won't, I can guarantee you.

29:15
So remember that you know it's always about at the heart of a puzzle, it's getting a key into a lock.

29:20
It's finding that.

29:21
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.

29:34
So a lot of homogeneous verbs.
29:36
That's like we talked about earlier, they'll use specific props and messages in their levels.

29:41
They'll repeat props.

29:42
You know, Zelda has the very classic, like broken rock that says, hey, this can be a bomb can go on
this.

29:49
There's a lot of cracks in this rock, blow it up.

29:52
So it's easy to kind of just place that on your level.

29:55
Of course, it's important to understand what a prop does and where it goes.

29:59
There's a lot of, you know, it's easy to find a broken rock in a Zelda environment because it's a fantasy
environment.

30:06
You're in a lot of nature.

30:07
It fits really well.

30:09
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.

30:17
They'll often modify that horizontal pole to look different depending on the temple you're in.

30:22
They'll consistently keep this kind of shape on there.

30:26
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.

30:32
So it's this kind of struggle to make a prop that is very clear to the player.
30:37
You understand exactly what you do when you interact with this prop and also make it fit in your
world because you don't want it just sticking out like a sore thumb.

30:47
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.

30:55
You want like a bunch of, like, repeated broken rocks just scattered around your game telling you to
solve a puzzle.

31:01
Like you want a very cohesive world that looks like the world you're trying to build.

31:06
So you know our San Max examples, all the things that you interact with San Max are very obviously
interactable, especially your fuse box.

31:15
Like it has these lightning bolts coming out of it.

31:17
It's bright.

31:19
It just begs to be looked at.

31:24
You also do this in cameras.

31:27
And so in Walking Dead, again, we wanted to keep a world consistent.

31:31
We didn't want to just kind of have big arrows pointing at stuff to use it.

31:35
We wanted to make sure that the player was just kind of very subtly guided to things.

31:40
So these are a few screenshots from a puzzle in Walking Dead episode 3.

31:46
And the story we wanted to tell was that someone is stealing drugs from your survival group.
31:52
They've left this broken flashlight.

31:55
Please figure out how they're doing this.

31:57
And so the narrative was you find these broken shards and then around the corner you see this X on
the wall.

32:04
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 from your survival camp and giving them away.

32:14
But we wanted to make sure that you saw them in that order.

32:17
Because if you just kind of found the pink X without any information or context, you're probably just
going to look at it and go, OK, well, that's weird, neat.

32:27
OK, So we wanted to make sure it was tied to our broken flashlight, tied to our perpetrator.

32:34
So we made sure that you can you have to look at the broken glass first before you even see the
broken X or the the chalk X rather.

32:44
So the bottom screenshots here, they're actually the navigation cameras we had in the level, and the X
is on this wall, the wall that's a facing screen left so you can actually see the X.

32:56
We actually 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.

33:04
So when they do, we play, we played actually played a cinematic and that revealed the X.

33:11
It actually showed Lee the main character himself, like making a mental connection between, OK, I just
found the pieces of this flashlight and now I'm finding this really suspicious mark.

33:21
So it kind of preps the player with the narrative to say, hey, you should be thinking about these two
objects together.
33:28
These two objects you just found have a relationship.

33:31
And we build that kind of with this narrative.

33:35
We also build it with cameras.

33:37
Every camera in that scene is moving up and to the left.

33:40
Every single one.

33:42
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.

33:53
And so we're always pushing the player, Hey, make a connection between these two things because
there's a narrative there and it's part of the puzzle.

34:04
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.

34:16
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 clue as of what that book looks like.

34:24
You literally have to just click on the books or hover your cursor over the books until something
happens.

34:29
And you know, at best this is very frustrating.

34:34
They just your players just kind of brute force clicking around.

34:37
They don't.

34:37
They're not thinking about the connections between the objects that they're looking at, they're just
kind of clicking mindlessly.

34:43
At worst, your player doesn't see that this is a puzzle at all and skips it.

34:48
So it's only important to message your clues, but also message your puzzle in general.

34:56
So props aren't the only way, of course, to messenger puzzles.

35:00
And I'm going to go back to Braid because Braid also uses patterns a lot.

35:05
You know, there was a pattern in the Hunt example that we had earlier that you understand, OK, I
know how to solve this.

35:10
I have a new mechanic in play now, but I still know how to solve like what the ultimate solution is to
this, this section.

35:19
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.

35:34
So in the first level, it's really just about letting that happen.

35:38
It's about letting that platform move over that danger and using it to get across the gap.

35:44
But then in world is four or five the ring level, suddenly the vertical platform is moving a lot faster.

35:53
And so you're like, OK, I have, I've seen this before, I understand that there's this platform has to go
above this vertical platform, but how do I do that?

36:02
This one's moving much faster.

36:03
Luckily you have a mechanic that slows things down when it's near it.
36:06
So the player's kind of building this relationship like they're very gradually building a relationship of
these things together.

36:17
I also want to talk really briefly about chunking, which is a psychological it's a process of taking
information, chunking it, and putting into larger units.

36:29
Something that was a big touchstone at Telltale was we never put more than around 5 things that
were part of a puzzle on screen ever.

36:36
And it's because humans can only hold so much information.

36:40
We really want them to make those relationships between the clues they're finding.

36:44
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.

36:51
Clicking a bunch of stuff just to click on it is just as mindless of a task.

36:54
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.

37:03
So it's important.

37:07
So our next big bullet point for when you build a puzzle, you know you have your goal, You've
messaged your goal, you've created your challenge.

37:14
The next important thing is giving the player feedback.

37:18
You need to let the player know how they're doing as they play your puzzle, and you can do that by
rewarding and encouraging your player when they're on the right track.

37:28
And you can also do that by communicating to the player when they've hit a dead end.
37:32
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.

37:44
Especially in adventure games, you'll often get the I can't use these things together and it it's not
great, it it means, OK, 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, there's like a dart board
full of axes and knives and they're like, oh, obviously Max should do something with that.

38:04
He's super violent, but it's not.

38:06
So those names just says, like, hey, no, sorry, but it's important.

38:11
Otherwise a player might just kind of go down a rabbit hole.

38:13
A rabbit hole, no pun intended.

38:18
And then The Walking Dead.

38:20
We actually solved this by kind of actually restricting the amount of verbs a player could even use.

38:26
You know, Lee is a whole inventory he has.

38:28
You know, there's two items in his inventory right now.

38:30
He normally can look at stuff, but when he's a zombie, he only can shoot it.

38:36
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 wheel and go, what if I look at the zombie?

38:52
What if I use my clipboard on the zombie?

38:56
You know, it's a lot faster and it's a lot more meaningful in the moment to just say you probably want
to shoot the zombie.

39:01
Lee's pretty afraid right now of the zombie.

39:05
Then when you find out the zombie is dead, we give you back your verbs like examine, look at
because they're relevant again.

39:11
I've gone from action mode from I'm scared of something to OK, now it's time to figure out what's
happening.

39:17
It's time for me to sit and think and look at the scene and understand what's happening here.

39:23
And then another important thing to remember when building a puzzle is to be kind.

39:29
Just be kind to your player again.

39:31
You're It's a contract of challenging them, but then not making things impossible.

39:38
Repetition isn't fun.

39:39
Making a player replay something over and over again because they failed isn't fun.

39:46
And checking your skill checks.

39:47
And what I mean by that is, you know, if you have a verb based, like a more systemic verb based
game, you have a lot of physics in your game.

39:54
The players challenge to move through it.

39:56
That's good, but make sure that those skill checks are informed.
40:00
Make sure they're not making the player repeat a lot of things.

40:03
I was just talking to a friend of mine, There's this forsaken fortress and Winwaker and I hated it.

40:09
I stopped playing Winwaker.

40:10
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.

40:23
And to be clear, I love Winwaker Zelda's great thumbs up, but man, that killed it.

40:29
Like and think of how good Winwaker is, but just having to repeat those puzzles over and over again.

40:34
They're puzzles so you have a dumb end solution.

40:36
You've found a dumb end strategy.

40:37
You know what you're doing if you know what you're doing, but you can't execute it.

40:42
It's extremely frustrating.

40:45
And to go out to Portal.

40:46
Again, they do a great job with this because whenever you fail in Portal, they either put you back very
close to where you failed.

40:55
So you're kind of learning.

40:56
OK, this was the last place I was before I screwed everything up.
41:00
I can now think about that.

41:02
So the deaths in Portal or the failures in Portal are also teaching the player hey, you were you were
right up to this point.

41:08
So try again.

41:10
You know what you did was wrong and now try a different solution.

41:18
The last thing when building a puzzle is integrate your story into your puzzle.

41:22
And that's why it's so important to have that macro chart, that progression flow of your game.

41:27
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.

41:36
The the picture on the left here is from a game called Quadrilateral Cowboy, where you're actually
hacking.

41:43
And when you're hacking in Quadrilateral Cowboy, you're moving through a level.

41:48
You're actually getting like take your laptop out and hack and like open a door, and it's very
integrated in the game.

41:54
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.

42:03
If you play Bioshock, it's not about playing Pipe Dream.

42:07
So the hacking puzzles in that game are a lot weaker because they're not integrated in the story.

42:12
There's kind of this weird mini game that happens.
42:16
So always look at your story and then remember the golden rule.

42:21
Always be kind of your players.

42:24
Let them give them a challenge, but give them the materials they need to complete that challenge.

42:30
If you ever watch Sherlock Holmes, it always cracks me up when people say, oh, you can follow along
Sherlock Holmes and solve the the, the crimes with him because you can't.

42:41
He has a ton of information that you don't have.

42:43
He's just saying, well, didn't you notice that his hand is for Cal's design?

42:48
He's a tennis player and the specific shoe print we found is a Nike tennis boot.

42:53
You know, this is information you didn't have.

42:55
And so you know, when you make your players feel like Watson just kind of staring at Sherlock, it
doesn't feel good.

43:03
So remember, puzzles are fun for the player, not the designer.

43:07
Don't get super excited about feeling clever, just make it a good experience.

43:11
So lastly, I want to talk about troubleshooting because as I said, you know, difficulty among other
things, It's really difficult to get right.

43:22
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.

43:30
And you do that with user testing and you do that as much as you can.
43:35
Seriously, you do that as much as you can.

43:39
There's no excuse for not getting user testing.

43:42
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.

43:51
There was a great postmortem for Mist in GDC 2013 that I definitely recommend checking out
because Robin Miller, Robin Miller was talking about how even before Mist was a game, even before
they were able to like throw it on a hypercard stack and make it a thing, they were doing it D&D style.

44:07
They would actually describe to the player this is what you see can you solve this?

44:11
And you know as you know Mist is very open and it it is allowed to be that way because they made
they did so much testing with here is literally as open we can get here is AD and D role-playing game
can you solve this puzzle And then later in the testing process when they did have something
implemented they actually would always test with two people.

44:31
They'd usually test with couples and that was because they like to talk to each other.

44:36
So you know obviously you know puzzle games are very heady.

44:39
We get in our own heads when we're solving them, but when we're solving with another person, we're
talking a lot more about what we're thinking and about our thought processes.

44:46
And it's a really great way to see what a player is thinking.

44:49
And having them argue for a solution is going to give you a lot more information than them just kind
of staring at the screen and blinking a lot.

45:00
Oh, I missed that.

45:01
Oh, but yeah.
45:02
So always note where your players get stuck.

45:04
And then yeah, look at this.

45:07
Next is coming like a self check to examine why they're getting stuck.

45:10
So if your player says that was too easy, which is very rare, but you'll get it, did you get the chance to
solve it themselves?

45:19
Did you just feed them?

45:20
Answer.

45:20
And if they think it's too easy, you know, maybe you already taught that concept before.

45:24
Maybe that mechanic was already really effectively tutorialized and you're kind of getting repetitious.

45:28
So look back at your chart and say, OK, maybe I don't need as much tutorialization as I thought.

45:35
They might also mean that it was just lock and key.

45:37
It was very obvious there weren't enough steps between your lock and your key to find those things.

45:43
There weren't enough variations in your verbs and applications.

45:46
If you guys ever played Pokémon, they have the cut mechanic.

45:49
And at first you're like, oh, I can't break these bushes.

45:53
I have to cut down these bushes.
45:54
How do I do that?

45:55
You learn cut and you can cut down bushes.

45:57
That's all you can ever do.

45:58
It never escalates to that.

46:00
It's always just there's no thinking anymore.

46:01
It's just like, OK, I have to taking my ratatat and I cut another Bush down.

46:05
OK.

46:07
It's not thinking, it's just lock and key.

46:09
It never evolves past that door so too hard which is a lot more common you'll get a lot more too
hards.

46:14
And you just ask yourself like, was it did I give information to solve this puzzle?

46:20
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?

46:26
Like, is it glossed forever or can they reference that information again?

46:30
Then of course is the goal clear to the player?

46:32
And this is looking at your level layout, looking at your visuals, making sure your path is clear, all the
all the stuff that you know level designer does when just making things obvious goals and then check
your dials.
46:45
Are there too many steps in your puzzle?

46:46
This is very, very common.

46:48
I see this all the time.

46:49
People just put too many steps in their puzzles because again it feels clever or they've been playing
their own game like 1000 times.

46:56
They're like well obviously you know these hundred steps, this like horrible Rube Goldberg machine
equates to this puzzle being solved.

47:03
But you know, on 1st blush a lot of players aren't going to get that.

47:06
And again, check your mechanics.

47:08
Are you teaching them well?

47:10
Are you changing the context of a mechanic?

47:12
And this is what it's talking about with consistency.

47:14
You know, it's great to make new applications for mechanics.

47:16
It's great to change them.

47:18
But if that new way is unintuitive or hasn't been to realized, a player's going to have a hard time with
it.

47:24
So your golden rules Take a picture of this.
47:28
When it's done, it's going to come in as bullets.

47:32
A good puzzle challenges the player without hand holding or being unfair fun for the player, not the
designer.

47:39
Don't be Sherlock Holmes.

47:42
Puzzles combine a game's theme and mechanics and rely on the consistency of each to make sense.

47:48
You know consistency is your friend.

47:50
And puzzles.

47:52
And look at your puzzle in the context of the game as a whole to judge difficulty.

47:56
It's the best way to figure out if your puzzle is doing what it needs.

47:58
Well, there's one more.

48:01
Watch others play your puzzle and check for assumptions you may have made.

48:05
You know, we're all different human beings.

48:06
We're all different people.

48:07
We're from different cultures.

48:09
We all think differently.

48:10
And that's the fun of puzzle design is you really get to watch people think and watch people work
through problems and learn new things.

48:19
And that's my talk.

48:22
This talk was really two hours long.

48:25
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 lot rational level design stuff, some great GDC talks from past years,
all good stuff.

48:40
And then I think how much time we got around five.

48:45
Yeah, I think like a couple of questions.

48:47
Yeah.

48:48
If anyone has questions, feel free to come up to the mics over there.

48:54
And thank you everybody.

49:06
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, hit a puzzle and literally walked away from the games.

49:17
And I mean, I've done this many times and but there's kind of like two ways.

49:21
Some games do kind of like, you know, the voice comes on and gives you a hint, but some games do
it too early.

49:26
There's ones where you walking through and you're thinking, okay, I'm just going and I'll go, oh, look
at this.

49:30
And it's a bit too much of a giveaway.
49:33
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 and doesn't work.

49:43
And not just to give away a hint or there's the key, but to dynamically change the puzzle.

49:48
Because it's like you've detected that the person's tried five things and it hasn't worked.

49:53
And we, we don't want them to give up.

49:54
We want them to keep playing.

49:56
Yeah.

49:57
So a lot of games have tried this, you know to hint systems think some hint symptoms are garbage.

50:03
Some hint symptoms are just really bad because they do just tell you go there's the key.

50:08
Go do it.

50:08
What are you doing, you idiot.

50:10
And yeah, that's always bad because it's still that same problem of I'm still not letting the play yourself
it themselves.

50:16
It's the designer kind of giving up on you.

50:17
It's your teacher just saying just copy my answers.

50:20
Just go.
50:21
It's that same feeling.

50:22
So I think there are good hint symptoms up there.

50:25
Actually Mist had a really good hint system, not Mist or a Mist.

50:29
Uru third one.

50:32
Yeah, they and it was really just because they wrote them well, they were very careful in their
language.

50:36
They were careful in how they gave them and eventually they got pretty on the nose.

50:40
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.

50:46
I've also seen Diamond.

50:47
So what you're describing I think of like a dynamic puzzle changing.

50:52
I've also seen that in like Silent Hill I think had that.

50:56
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.

51:03
And when you played that game on those different difficulties, the puzzles actually changed and they
they used the dials we talked about.

51:09
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 for everyone puzzle.

51:18
So I think that's a big barrier is just that amount of content you have to make.
51:22
You're suddenly tripling your scope because there is, you know puzzles are so tightly interwoven.

51:29
It's tough to kind of get.

51:30
It's tough to just kind of take away or put in steps to add difficulty.

51:36
So, so you think it's too much of A design.

51:39
It would just be too much of a challenge for the.

51:42
I think it's a great challenge to try.

51:44
I think it's a good design challenge.

51:45
I think the scope is where you're going to run into trouble.

51:48
But maybe you got a ton of money.

51:50
Thank you.

51:56
We have one more.

51:57
I think we have two minutes left in this session unless we want to break out to a panel.

52:01
Hi, I'd like to hear your thoughts on like how it can be hard to teach somebody something during an
intense moment.

52:09
Like how it's probably easier when they're things are very calm and you have your own.

52:14
But if you're like doing an FPS or a more action, a game like how to teach the player even though he's
in an intense or she is in an intense moment, Like if there's an action, a lot of action going on.

52:26
And the advice on how to teach players things.

52:29
If it's supposed to be a high intensity game, how do you teach players or have puzzles in there?

52:33
Well, I think even in a high intensity game you are going to have points of low intensity.

52:38
Like if your game's only high tension, it's just going to feel like you're going to hit all the time and
you're just going to become numb.

52:46
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.

52:55
It's great when you can say, hey, you learned some basics and now you're in a more tense moment,
your, you know, difficulties added through a time, a timing element or something like that.

53:06
But yeah, I think I think it's more just like kind of making sure the player again has that tool set they
need.

53:11
They have that knowledge in there.

53:13
And then when they're confronted with this stressful situation, you can ask them to do something like
that.

53:18
You can ask them to test what they know or challenge themselves in some way.

53:22
But I think it's really just that's how much more work you're going to have to do to really scaffold their
knowledge and their skills.

53:28
Does that answer your question?

53:31
So in generally, just try to avoid teaching players too much new stuff during the touch moments and
then just have them apply that knowledge in a different way.

53:39
Rather.

53:39
Yeah, I think so because your action, you know, that's a new setting, I'm suddenly, I suddenly have a
lot more things to think about.

53:45
So that's all new information, new stuff that's adding to the difficulty.

53:49
So there's not really much more you need to do from there.

53:51
You know, you're already giving them something stressful to deal with.

53:54
OK.

53:57
Thanks.