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[What is your process for designing puzzles? Here's mine (which I'm looking to refine)]

So this grew from the thread about my current game-in-production and it made more sense to start a new conversation here.

What is your process for designing puzzles? Here's mine (which I'm looking to refine)

Designing puzzles is hard. Maybe that's why there's so little participation in the (shameless plug) Puzzle-Making Practice competition. My own process varies from game to game, so I'll stick to the current one.

The first question I ask is: What kind of game am I trying to make? Classic third-person P&C? First person? Visual novel? Even platformer? In the early stages of design, it may not always be clear what subgenre is the best fit for your project. And if you're not sure, puzzle design will feel extremely haphazard. (This won't necessarily change later.  ) But the kind of game you make narrows the kind of puzzles that can be put in the game (or does it? Can you, for example, solve a murder in a platformer? I'd love to try).

A second part of this is who are you designing for? Experienced adventurers, beginners, or a wider audience? How difficult do you want the game to be? Do you care more about story or obstacles, or both equally?

Once you have a subgenre (or two, or three...) and a target audience, then what?

What I do is:

1. Start with story. What is the player/protagonist trying to achieve, story-wise? It doesn't need to be complicated. It could be simply "Get to the other end of the dungeon," and that's the entire game, room after room. It could be "Solve a murder." It could be "Become president."  Here's what's important: the overarching goal will help determine the obstacles.

2. Where does the game take place? Setting has a huge effect on puzzles. Solving a murder in the wilderness is going to feel different from solving one in the city, and different from solving one on a spaceship. Get a good feel for your setting and the places for obstacles will become clearer.

3. Push-and-pull between puzzle and setting. This is where it helps to be flexible. Once you have a goal and a setting you can both refine the setting around the puzzles and also refine the puzzles around the setting. Play with them like clay until they fit together--add rooms, delete rooms, change what type of obstacle is in a room. But...

4. Do the obstacles make sense? Why is that key under the sink? Who hid it there and why? Or what about that bookshelf in the basement? Would the homeowner really want to go down all those stairs to get at it? If you don't know the ins and outs of everything, the player won't be satisfied with either the setup or the solution.

5. Is the puzzle solution too clear or too obscure? This is where I struggle. And where test players come in. As @CaptainD suggested in the other thread, it's really hard to gauge difficulty when you're the one making the puzzle. How do you give clues without giving the whole thing away? How do you know when not to give clues and trust that the player already has enough information?

I'm really interested in how others design puzzles in your own games. Do you have a set of principes you follow? A process of steps like (or unlike) the one I listed above? How do you figure out difficulty, clues, and teaching the player the tools without too much hand-holding? How do you make sure the puzzles make sense within the world?

I'm not so much interested in what to avoid (although that's important) but more so in what you gravitate toward. How do you do it? Are there reasons you do it that way?

Thanks in advance for any answers!

Great praise, @CaptainD , I'll do my best to live up to it! 

My last MAGS game was made with 3.6.2.2. I can test this current RC version of 3.6.2 with some of my previous games if that's helpful.

EDIT: My Mode7 game that's in progress was started quite a while ago with 3.6.1.27. I can test that game in 3.6.2 RC 1 as well.

[Welcome again to Puzzle-Making Practice: Where you design the solution!]

(Since there were no other entries besides mine last time, I'll just go ahead and start a new thread. Any objections?)

UPDATE: VOTE BY COMMENTING BELOW. CRITERIA BELOW.

Welcome again to Puzzle-Making Practice: Where you design the solution!

Last time we had a situation where you had to break yourself out of an asylum. Now we need to break into a museum!

The background:

You're a crook who steals valuable art to sell on the black market. One of the most prestigious museums in your area now displays a priceless painting. The good news: You've broken into this museum before, so you know the security systems. The bad news: this new priceless painting is displayed in an extra-protected case!

The situation:

It's nighttime. You're on the roof of the museum. There's a security camera but you've already disabled it without being caught. It looks a little weathered and is slightly falling loose from its pole. Next to you is a glass skylight through which you can look down into the display room and see the display case with your prize.

The display case is bulletproof glass. It has a digital pad requiring a pin and a fingerprint to open the case.

You can see apertures in the walls of the room that likely send invisible lasers across the area. A night watchman stands in the corner, eyes on the case at all times. There are more security cameras, one in each corner of the room. Other priceless paintings hang on the walls. You know from past experience that each has a motion sensor behind it that will trip an alarm system.

The roof also has plenty of possible anchors for ropes or hooks, and you can also see down two other skylights into adjacent rooms. One has more alarm-rigged paintings on the walls, but only one video camera, no lasers, and no night watchman. Unfortunately, its only exit leads to a hallway with more cameras--and, more importantly, the front exit, but not to the room with your prize. The two rooms do share a wall, however.

The third skylight leads to the restroom, where there are no security devices of any kind. Outside the restroom is a hall that does lead to the room with the prize, but there is another night watchman posted outside the door, and another fingerprint and pin pad to get in.

There is also a fire escape leading off the roof of the museum, and an adjacent building with a roof close enough to jump to.

In your thief's kit you carry the following:
-A long sturdy rope
-Another rope with a grappling hook
-A set of traditional lock-picking tools
-A list of people whose fingerprints will be accepted by the pin pads
-A single smoke bomb
-Goggles to protect your eyes from smoke (but they are not night-vision goggles)
-A sack to protect and hide the painting once you steal it
-A bad copy of the painting you mean to steal--it might fool an amateur for a minute, but even a fool would know it was fake after looking at it for longer than that.
-A set of screwdrivers
-A hacksaw strong enough to cut metal
-Wire cutters
-A truncheon for self-defense
-A powerful flashlight with multiple brightness settings
-A smart phone with a good camera

The goal:
-Get into the museum, get the painting, and get out, without getting captured.

The Rules!

Participants respond to the set-up by writing entries that must do the following:
1. Use at least 3 of the provided elements (inventory, NPCs, a piece of the room like a cabinet or faucet etc.)
2. Give a step-by-step walkthrough of your puzzle solution.
3. Don't add new elements. For example, if the room is a forest, breaking a thin branch off a tree makes sense unless the host said the trees were huge and tall. But adding a hollowed-out stump with a bear sleeping in it is too specific. Assume all important elements have been mentioned by the host.
4. Keep any dialog elements summarized rather than typing out the whole conversation (for example, "threaten the mailman", "ask the child for advice", and so on, instead of giving every spoken line).

Each contest runs for two weeks to allow for a good number of entries, and then it switches to voting for one week. The participant whose solution gets the most votes gets to come up with the next scenario! (Please also provide a link to these rules).

Voters use the criteria of:
a) how logical the puzzle seems
b) how creative or unexpected (but still sensible) is the use of elements
c) how satisfying is the solution (Is it too simple? Way too complicated? Or just right?)

Entries accepted through the end of February.

Have fun!

I must admit to not being a Myst fan

@CaptainD I just watched a Myst walkthrough after not playing it for many years, and I have to say, the puzzles were much more far-fetched than I remembered. A HUGE part of the game (perhaps even the point of it) seems to be figuring out how physically distant elements are related, and the solutions are logical but (from a standpoint of how people in these places might actually function) COMPLETELY impractical. SO much of the game is carried by the beauty of the setting and the fascination of the story. That isn't a problem in itself, but wow are those puzzles difficult. I don't think they're unfair, but they are... close to that. (EDIT: This sounds very harsh but I say it lovingly, as a longtime fan )

For my own game, I'm certainly trying to avoid things like "a switch on one side of the island triggers something far away." At least, unless there's a story/setting REASON for it to be far away, and enough clues to be able to figure out how and why the two things are connected.

I'll admit, such puzzle design is VERY difficult, and that's the stage I'm at right now--refining the puzzles to be difficult but realistic, and how to give adequate signposting without telling the player the solution. I guess these are the perennial difficulties of puzzle design.

I'm really curious--do you have hard principles, best practices, or a consistent process when designing your own puzzles? I'd love to hear about all that if so.  (EDIT: I don't mean to put you on the spot though. No pressure if it's a long and complicated question to answer).

I have had confusion about this in the past but I have learned a couple of useful things over time.

on_mouse_click does not get called over GUIs (I looked to see if the manual mentions this in the on_mouse_click section, but it appears that it doesn't).

You can, however, use on_event, with eEventGUIMouseDown.

And for the default inventory click handling to work, the mouse mode actually does need to be eModeInteract for a left click to select the item. This is mentioned in the manual section on the General Settings panel, but it is a brief mention that is easy to miss.

@MIGGO Thank you! I'm really excited to be finally working on it in earnest, even just one small piece at a time.

[SOLATI: Tethered in Time]

SOLATI: Tethered in Time
A first-person puzzle game in the epic tradition of Myst and Riven

After a cataclysmic event that nearly destroys the Earth, a small remnant of humanity awakes many thousands of years in the future, in a sealed-off community within a gargantuan alien spacecraft. Why are they here? Can they ever escape? A small band of those intent on escaping went missing years ago, but now they've left a message: the unseen aliens have time travel. Maybe the way to escape from this far-future prison is to prevent their imprisonment in the first place. It won't be easy. In fact it will be nearly impossible. But that's where you come in.




There's so much to say about this project. It's been such a long time coming and is still so early in development. How early?

ART: <1%
PROGRAMMING: <1%
STORY: 70%
PUZZLE DESIGN: 30%
MUSIC: 95%

I've been working on the music for two while I made... 5 other games? It's been quite the journey. I wrote a devlog about it here, the text of which is below, within the spoiler tag:

Spoiler

2/3/2025

The idea for this game started a handful of years ago, before I got back into game development, with the original intention to make it a novel. As I began to fulfill a longtime fascination with making games, though, I realized the story fit even better with the game medium, and that such a project could become what I've always wanted to do—make a first-person puzzle game like the Myst series, where exploring and interacting with an otherworldly setting progresses a compelling story.

The seed of Solati had been fully planted. But at the time the project felt like a distant fantasy, far too large for one person to make, and certainly beyond my own art and programming skills.

But I nurtured it with the things I could do—write story, design puzzles, and compose music. Over the course of the last two years, while I made Tunnel Vision and My Siblings, the Stones, as well as a total of five game jam entries, I worked in the background writing puzzle and story notes in a sketchbook alongside rough pencil drawings, and creating the music for the major game locations.

As I finished smaller games, my skills evolved much further than I expected, and all the while I kept Solati in the back of my mind as "The Big One," the game I would make when I had finally reached an advanced level. But before I got there, I kept tinkering with another larger game I'd had on the back burner for a while, the other passion project I'd long wanted to pursue—a low-res faux-3D Train Simulator.

In two aspects this game finally pushed me to the point where I could make Solati—art and programming. Even though Traction: 2.5-D Trainsim is very far from finished, its programming needs grew so complicated every step of the way that a first-person puzzler like Solati began to look much simpler by comparison, even though it would be a much longer game. In terms of art, drawing object after object for Traction helped me figure out both a style and a process, two factors that had kept me from diving into anything for Solati beyond pencil sketches.

So I started drawing character portraits and test backgrounds, one for each of the "realms" in Solati, to see how fast I could do so. And after drawing three or four of each, suddenly, the prospect of drawing a hundred of them didn't feel so overwhelming anymore. Complicated, yes. Time-consuming, yes. A marathon, absolutely yes. But doable.

What was more, after a two-year journey during which I'd grown massively as a composer, I had now finished nearly all of the music for the game, which reinforces the story and gives me existing mood and direction to help steer the art and puzzles of each environment. This means if I falter and again feel like the game is too big for me, I nonetheless have nearly a full hour of orchestrated music, close to the entire soundtrack album, that I can hear to experience the emotions of the story and, hopefully, keep me going.

It's hard to describe the feeling that yes, this can actually happen. I don't yet know whether I'll make this a commercial game or if I'll do a Kickstarter or a Patreon, or any other form of monetization. It's too early for that. And I will likely pause development of Solati at times to work on Traction. But now that I've cobbled together enough art to make a teaser trailer, I can say with certainty that this much is true: the journey has begun. It won't be a short one. A seedling takes multiple seasons to mature and establish. I hope you'll follow along with me as I make it happen one small piece at a time.

For now, here's the teaser trailer. I hope you enjoy watching it as much as I enjoyed making it.

[close]

And yes, I cobbled all my existing art and part of the opening cinematic cutscene music into a TRAILER! Enjoy!

Played with this module a bit today and am mostly very happy with the results, but I found a possible bug: If I'm using Sierra-style speech with portrait, than using FancySayTyped means I have to specify a width for the text box, otherwise it can overlap with the portrait (especially if the portrait image is large and the portrait alignment is set to "right" in general settings. Setting a width does allow me to keep it from overlapping though.

I released an arcade game just a month or two ago. I haven't open-sourced it (though I might at some point). I'm happy to answer any questions about the code. 

AGS database link:
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/2803-bad-to-the-coral/

EDIT: here's a video of the gameplay:
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?msg=636667288

Another thing--I'm almost certain that some of my games had gold-cup player ratings (Tunnel Vision did, I think--it has 5 comments), however this seems to have not carried over to the new site. Has the number of ratings to display a gold-cup rating increased? Curious if anyone else has noticed this with their own games.

Just a small thing, but when you click on a "download" button from a game page, the text changes to "downloading" before sending you to the game's website. Given that no games are actually hosted on the AGS website, having the text say something like "connecting" or "redirecting" instead of "downloading" might eliminate that few seconds of misinformation where the button indicates that a download has started.

Maybe I misunderstood something. The stickied thread mentions CACert providing certificates freely.

Thanks, CW. Clearly I have proven eri0o's point about sticky threads. Oops. I'm glad it seems there are options out there, since I may at some point make a commercial game still released through itch.io, and would want Windows to show it as verified. Steam has a high financial barrier to entry. Anyway, I'll leave it at that so as not to get the thread off topic.

@yodabear
AGS games (and tons of other hobbyist / indie games) are pretty much never signed because nobody bothers to go through the trouble.

Hey @Khris (and and everyone else), I'm wondering if maybe there should be an official and/or stickied tutorial thread on how to do this. I've never done it myself because I'm not sure of the best and/or cheapest way to do so. A quick search turned up these results, but I'm not sure it's accessible enough for beginning devs. What do you think?

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/252226/signing-a-windows-exe-file

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48946680/how-to-avoid-the-windows-defender-smartscreen-prevented-an-unrecognized-app-fro/66582477#66582477

@Crimson Wizard that is an absolutely genius solution that would NEVER have occured to me. 

I threw together a quick test:




It works perfectly. 

I figure to set up different objects in different rooms, I can use global variables for the button graphic, button X, and button Y. Then, for interactions, I suppose I can call different room scripts depending on which room the button is clicked in and which object it is set to appear as. Complicated, but very doable!

Thanks so much. I've edited the thread name to reflect the question as solved!  

Hey all,

I'm currently designing the gameplay for a project and am trying to figure out how to make a fairly important part of the game work.

The concept is this: In the game there is a big GUI that looks like a smartphone. When "AR mode" is activated, the phone follows the cursor, and the phone screen reveals hidden objects in the room. I don't want the objects to visibly "appear" but to naturally slide into view--for example a large object could be only half visible, with the half outside the phone GUI remaining hidden--so toggling Object.Visible or Object.Enabled won't really work.

The only way I can think of to attempt scripting this is to have two versions of each room, with one version of the room hidden offscreen, and for the phone screen to be a viewport and camera that lead to the hidden version of the room which contains the hidden objects to be revealed by the phone screen.

Is this the only way to do it? This is going to be a big project with a 50+ rooms, so having two different versions of each room feels like a potentially very inefficient method. Can anyone think of a better approach?

Thanks very much.

I haven't managed to play many games this past year. Will nominate once I get a few more down, hopefully this week or next

This was a great year for AGS. It's hard to believe how many top-quality commercial and non-commercial games were released--it's really going to be a tough competition to win the awards! 

For my part I managed to release 3 different games this year (2 for MAGS, one not) which has been a great year for me as a very-much-still-learning gamedev. Despite my bigger projects moving very slowly, I was able to practice and grow in so many different areas thanks to MAGS.

Speaking of which, I feel like this has also been an amazing year for MAGS in general. Every month it felt like there was a really healthy number of entries--so many I couldn't play them some months--and I wouldn't be surprised to see many MAGS games from this year represented among the eventual nominees. 

On the whole, this year has been a fun and vibrant time to be an AGS player and developer. I look forward to the nomination and voting stages as an excuse to play more of this year's games. 

[For Your Consideration:Bad to the Coral]

For Your Consideration:
Bad to the Coral

https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/2803-bad-to-the-coral/
https://rootbound.itch.io/bad-to-the-coral

An action arcade game originally made for MAGS where you protect a coral reef by catching various pieces of garbage in different-sized nets. Maintain combos and get health bonuses for higher scores as you see how long you keep the reef alive.

Please consider for:

-Best Non-Adventure Game
-Best Audio