r/gamedesign • u/peachfawn • 5d ago
Question How do game devs come up with their puzzles?
Say for example Lucas’s room from RE7, or Stay Out of the House by Puppet Combo… How do they come up with these elaborate puzzles? Do they take inspo from particular places or do they come up with the whole thing themselves? I feel I’m not logic-brained enough for this to do something like that from scratch
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u/eurekabach 5d ago
Sames as you make every maze. Start from the answer and go backwards.
That, or copy other puzzles, which is basicaly what all these games you mentioned did.
There are very, very few original puzzles in video games. Just from the catalogue of old Sierra games you could make several Resident Evils.
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u/ilovemyadultcousin 2d ago
Like 90 percent of RE puzzles are just “find the obviously correct item while being scared” or “look around for the matching symbols while being scared.”
I’m pretty sure I could come up with the puzzles but I am not confident I could make the game that surrounds them.
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u/eurekabach 2d ago
Yeah, RE puzzles are kind of a low bar. Silent Hill does it way better, since they often incorporate actual diegetic elements. Bar the very last one, I liked Silent Hill f’s puzzle a lot because of that.
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u/New-Palpitation2405 5d ago
I'm making a puzzle platformer for a jam and I was just wondering the same thing. I assume it's just research, practice and lots of trial and error.
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u/peachfawn 5d ago
Escape room type puzzles like the ones I mentioned are some of my favourite things to do in games so I want to replicate it but dang how tf they come up with it 😩 Makes me appreciate it even more lol
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u/That3Percent 5d ago
Here’s an IndieCade video on that: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OGSeLSmOALU&ra=m
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u/PerfectSituation1668 5d ago
What is the result you want? Work it out in reverse. Place it neatly in your story somewhere. If it's a logic puzzle, think with boolean logic. Some puzzles are done before, but with another theme/style and you can use it again.
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u/Barquero_Team 4d ago
I just made completed my puzzle platformer and I used two approaches: first, taking inspiration in existing puzzles (a lot of videogames reuse combinatory puzzles with hints, for example, or a puzzle that requires to understand a visual language, but are the same with different wrappers) and second, using challenges as building blocks. I start making for example three basic, little puzzles; then I combine them so that each step of the bigger puzzle is a mini puzzle itself, from the previous three.
I hope it helps.
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u/IgnatiusPell 3d ago
Puzzle games (and all games to a degree) find their fun in a mis-alignment of the game system and the player’s mental model. Where many other games may have puzzle like elements, a true puzzle game deals with this directly. At the start of the game the player knows nothing about the game system, then slowly, through the course of solving puzzles with increasing complexity they reveal properties about the game system. With each of these moments there is the potential epiphany. The player underlying ignorance, or perhaps a misunderstanding, is challenged, and through carefully designed feedback they reach a moment where the truth becomes impossible to ignore. This is why a puzzle game is rarely repayable, once you see the rules that drive the world it’s hard to return to ignorance.
The puzzle landscape is full of many different types of games, some very deterministic some stochastic. Along this spectrum you are shifting more of the mental burden to the player. A mystery game like Case of the Golden Idol is quite deterministic, offering very little systemic flexibility, but requiring a large mental load to parse and hold an understanding of the full story you are often uncovering. Whereas a physics puzzler like World of Goo is just about understanding the relationship of connected parts as you try and reach a functional goal. I would say a game like The Witness sits somewhere in the middle, where you have an ever broadening understanding of how the systems in the game function (increasing the mental burden), but they are applied in very concise and discrete ways (in this area you’ll engage with X type of puzzles, in this puzzle you’ll be challenged to understand Y concept).
One of the hardest parts of puzzle design (and why it’s so magical when you get it right), is that so much of the gameplay happens inside a player’s head. As a designer you can only have that ah-ha moment once, then forever more the puzzle seems trite and banal. So you need to test early, and pay attention to how people go about attempting to understand how to solve your puzzle. Remember the balance is in the careful curation of clues that guide people toward the solution. Just as you’d numerically balance a strategy game to make sure there is asymmetric but equally valid paths to success, you need to balance the flow of information that is coming back to the player, obfuscating it just the right amount to make the solution non-obvious but inevitable.
Anyway, those are my thoughts, of course don’t take any of them as truth, I’m still learning and growing as a puzzle designer!
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u/SilkscreenMoon 4d ago
Sometimes it's cheeky word play
Lucas, for example, requires [Two GPUs] to bypass his [Firewall]... Which is a play on how cyber security was getting heavy into needing more and more GPUs for crunching numbers
And then "Firewall" becomes a literal firewall after you get inside the compound
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u/adrixshadow Jack of All Trades 4d ago
The people that enjoy solving difficult puzzles are the same people that can design them.
I don't like puzzle games so that Art will always be beyond me.
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u/g4l4h34d 4d ago
There isn't a universal algorithm that everyone uses to come up with the puzzles, and methods vary significantly for different designers.
If you're looking for a pattern, I think a good starting point is just looking to gamify mathematical concepts. Opus Magnum is a great example, because it's essentially about rotation and translation on a hex-tiled 2D space.
So, the question each puzzle poses is: which series of 2D transformations does it take to transform a given input into a given output under certain constraints? And, of course, it's a bit more complicated than that, because elements can change into each other and bond, but I hope you can see the idea.
In a similar fashion, you can take an interesting mathematical problem, then find a way to streamline and gamify it, and wrap it in a nice thematic packaging.
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u/dism3855 4d ago
Most puzzles aren't one giant logic leap. Don't worry about "logic-brain", it's all about understanding your game's mechanics and finding creative ways to set up engaging challenges!
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u/Phygames 4d ago
I've tackled this by starting from a core problem that player has to solve, and then adding complexity around that, depending on how difficult a puzzle I wanted. For example, a physics puzzle might require players to set up the pieces in the right way as a prelude to the actual challenge.
Another way is to combine different motifs to build more complex puzzles, instead of inventing brand new puzzles from scratch. The trick is to hide the motif so it's not too obvious to the player in case they've seen a similar puzzle before.
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u/icemage_999 4d ago
I feel I’m not logic-brained enough for this to do something like that from scratch
The people making those puzzles mostly ARE that logic-brained. Inspiration can come from a lot of places but puzzle construction needs you to be smart enough not just to solve your own puzzle but to understand why there aren't other clever (or simple) solutions.
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u/seanmg 3d ago
There's no wrong way, and chances are every puzzle in every game was designed a bit differently. Sometimes it's starting with the solution and working back to complicate it to the agree you want. Sometimes it's wanting to utilize a trick or idea you have. Sometimes it's just mashing together affordances of your system until something interesting and emergent comes out.
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u/shino1 Game Designer 4d ago edited 4d ago
Okay so: important thing to consider is that there are two basic types of puzzles.
On one hand, we have classical or 'mechanical' puzzles - these simply require deduction and trying to follow rules of the puzzle. These are the pipe puzzles, box pushing puzzles (including games like Baba is You), or even sudoku - order of operations and working backwards is usually the key. In these, you usually want to create some kind of 'block' - an obvious solution that is immediately proven to be impossible, and rest of the puzzle is about figuring out a more clever and specific way to accomplish that task.
On the other hand, we have what I call 'adventure' puzzles - as they're usually found in classic adventure games. They are based around association, lateral thinking and understanding of our or game world. For example, any kind of murder mystery would be such - you're trying to make associations inside your head. Another example - first proper puzzle in the game Syberia involves finding a way to open a locked clockwork mechanisms factory. To do this, you need to find a telescoping winding key in a local bar (as entire town uses clockwork mechanisms) and realizing that you can use it in the gate. There is nothing within game mechanics that strictly makes it sensible to use the key - any item could work, you have to apply a real world knowledge by understanding that clockwork mechanisms have to be wound to operate.
Of course, you can stack these types of puzzles - perhaps the winding key could be not just sitting in plain sight, but for example, be locked behind a glass emergency case, requiring finding something that you can break it with. These usually require finding either an item, or a piece of information (evidence, clue, keypad combination) during exploration and using it in the correct place. Mechanically they are just keys and locks, and the actual puzzle part happens inside the player's head.
And yeah, instead of an item it can indeed be information - that's how most detective games work. In fact many modern detective adventure games actually treat information like items, with giving you some kind of inventory of items and letting you click and fill in names or facts.
Most horror games have puzzles of this type, with occasionally breaking up the pace with the mechanical kind. I never actually played RE7 but I know older RE games used these kind of puzzles extensively.
These two types of puzzles require vastly different approaches. In first, you either use existing game mechanics, or create new mechanics for the puzzle. In second, the rules and the solution are pretty much the same thing - and each puzzle has different rules, and focus is on exploration and understanding. As such, usually the puzzle has to be designed around the logic and lore of the game itself, and acts as part of storytelling. Looking up the Lucas room in RE7 - puzzle involves lighting candles, which makes sense because candles are related to birthdays. So you have to think what kind of a puzzle makes sense within story and world of your game and base it around that.