Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
In puzzle games, puzzle solving is the primary activity, though puzzles may occur
within a storyline or lead up to some larger goal. That doesn't mean that you can
offer a random collection of puzzles and call it a game; puzzle games usually pro-
vide related challenges, variations on a theme. The types of puzzles offered include
recognizing patterns, making logical deductions, or understanding a process. In all
cases, the puzzles give the player clues that have to be somehow unraveled or solved
to meet the victory condition. Puzzle solving under severe time constraints—as in
Tet r is
—belongs more to the action than to the puzzle game genre.
Tet r is
and the
many games similar to it depend more on physical coordination challenges than
they do on logic problems.
To be a commercial success, a puzzle game needs to be challenging ( but not too
hard), visually attractive, and above all, enjoyable. It also needs to be fresh and to
offer enough gameplay to justify the purchase price. Although solitaire card games
such as
FreeCell
belong in the class of puzzle games, unless you sell a lot of them
together as a collection, people are unlikely to want to pay for them.
Scott Kim's Eight Steps
Scott Kim is a designer who creates puzzles for print media, web sites, and computer
games. At the 1999 Game Developer's Conference he gave a lecture entitled “The
Art of Puzzle Game Design,” in which he identified eight steps in puzzle game
design (Kim, 1999). The first four steps comprise the process of specifying the rules,
while the last four comprise the process of building the puzzles and the game itself:
1.
Find inspiration.
This can come from a variety of sources, including other
games.
Tet r is
, for example, was inspired by a noncomputer game called
Pentominoes
.
You can be inspired by a piece of art (the drawings of M. C. Escher have a ver y
puzzlelike feel), a story, or some particular subject matter. Another source of inspi-
ration is a play dynamic of some kind: flipping switches, turning knobs, sliding
objects around, or picking them up and putting them down. Or there are more
complex dynamics among objects: balance, reflection, connection, and
transmission.
2.
Simplify.
Suppose you have an idea for a puzzle: efficiently parking vehicles of
different sizes in a crowded parking lot so that when someone asks you to retrieve
his car, you have to move as few other cars as possible. Part of making this task fun
is simplifying it to its essentials. First, identify the essential tricky core skill (in this
case, space planning on the fly) and concentrate on that. Second, eliminate any
irrelevant details. Don't make your player worry about crashing the cars, for exam-
ple. Third, make the pieces uniform. Instead of having cars with infinitely variable
shapes and sizes, it's better to have several standard types that conform to a square
grid. Finally, simplify the controls. Figure out what the essential moves are and
devise controls that implement them with a minimum of fiddling.
