The Art of Puzzle Design | How Game Designers Explore Ideas and Themes with Puzzles and Problems

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

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

Sources

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

Videos

-Gdc talk Solving Puzzle Design Jolie Menzel
   • Level Design Workshop: Solving Puzzle...  

- Empuzzlement Blow, droquen, Ten Bosche
   • IndieCade 2013 - Empuzzlement  

-Designing to reveal the nature of the universe
   • IndieCade 2011: Jonathan Blow & Marc ...  

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

-Open ended puzzle design at zachtronics
   • Open-Ended Puzzle Design at Zachtronics  

- Breaking Conventions with the legend of zelda
   • Breaking Conventions with The Legend ...  

-Making Baba is you
   • #GAMELAB19: Making Baba Is You,what i...  

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

- A look back at fezs Black Monolith
https://kotaku.com/a-look-back-at-fez...

- Designing Baba is yous rule wrtiing system
https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/3...

-How to make a good puzzle
https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/TomHe...

Gdc hearts and minds
   • Hearts and Minds