Postmortem for my first puzzle design project

So, it's been two days after the release, and things are starting to die down (well tbh they are never a "hit" or anything haha), now I feel like I'm calm enough to write down some thoughts during and after the process of designing my first puzzles.

This post may contain spoilers for the puzzles. Not the specific solutions, but I will definitely discuss things you need to think about (or at least I want you to think about) when solving the puzzles. You have been warned!

Idea Formation

Surprisingly, not too much went through my mind when designing these puzzles, since I've said time and time again that I designed all of them within two days after coming up with an idea.

I can actually talk about how I came up with this idea, but it is a little embarrassing, really.

After some recent experience with some absolutely excellent paper puzzle experiences, such as Abdec and FMTC, I just can't stop myself from, well, basically fantasizing about designing something even close to them by myself.

I have no puzzle design background whatsoever, paper or not, and this would be an extremely ambitious first project for a complete beginner. I know they are not practical in any way conceivable, but in my wildest fantasies, there would be a rule discovery puzzle set featuring a fictional charting system for music, much like how Abdec features a fictional writing system for fictional creatures. The main mechanic would be drawing loops, and they can be see as "sheet music" in some way that I hadn't specified.

I came up with some ideas around this theme. For example, the black dots and given line segments you see here are originally "notes", and there would be some constraint on the position and order of their placements, but I never followed through after some failed attempts to construct interesting puzzles. The player could hypothetically also start putting the "notes" into the grid by themselves at some point, like they are "composing", but I've solved too few object placement puzzles to know what I'm doing.

So I ultimately didn't follow through with this whole elaborate idea. If you feel inspired, feel free to take the idea and make it, it will certainly be better than whatever I could come up with, at least in my current inexperienced state.

But one idea did stand out, which is the core idea used in this puzzle set: Dividers. They are originally planned to be introduced as a way to write "measures", since you often divide music into meatures of equal lengths, I thought it would be a fitting constraint.

It did turn out to be pretty interesting, so much so that I actually, for the first time in my life, moved from "idea" stage to actual "design" stage. We will see how well that goes in the next part:

Puzzle Design

My designing process wasn't as "organized" as I'd hoped, because I was just randomly putting things inside the grid to see what works. That's right, pure trial-and-error, with a bit of intuition.

But, I know I'm somewhat on the right track here. I've known from the most renowned puzzle designers in the community that exploration and experimentation are the keys to designing puzzles, and that brilliant ideas don't just come to mind out of thin air. There really is no way to know if an idea is good before trying to build puzzles around it.

Puzzle 1 and 3 are among the first puzzles I've "discovered" after playing around with Dividers, I find beauty in them because it is surprising that a unique solution can be forced with such a small number of clues. Puzzle 1 is more of a "local" puzzle since you can visualize the loop's structure and it feels just like extending paths/loops/regions in common puzzle types. On the other hand, I intended Puzzle 3 to be about proving all space is needed, by seeing the relationship between lengths of the "inside segment" and "the outside segment", and considering when they can be equal when the outside segment is almost always longer.

After sending them to a real-life friend for playtesting, I thought proving the grid has to be filled might be too hard for its original intended position because of how "mathy" it is, so I made Puzzle 2, originally planning for it to bridge the difficulty gap, but it might have ended up mildly difficult as well. I'm glad that I came up with it though, there were some interesting local and global deductions to be made in there.

Then, of course, I played around with the idea of more than 2 Dividers in the grid at the same time. By this time, I've noticed a "trend" my brain tends to cling onto when starting to solve a puzzle like these: deducing the length of each segment first.

There's also parity, I'm talking about the classic "chessboard parity" here. Because the length of each segment is equal, you can only go from one Divider to another either by staying on the same parity/color, or alternating between different parities/colors.

So, I tried to show all of these observations in the last 4 puzzles. The first step of each puzzle is pretty much all about deducing the length of each segment, using the grid's size to get a maximum length, and other clues to get a minimum length, ultimately forcing a fixed value. After proving this, it would be much easier to do local deductions, because you would know how some of the segments must go, and sometimes you can prove the loop must pass through every empty cell.

As for parity, I think it is most apparent in Puzzle 7, as the first intended step would be to see that, out of all the Dividers that the bottom Divider could reach, considering parity, only one of them is reachable with a path less than 7-cells-long, and the loop requires it to reach 2 of them. But they are useful for pretty much every other puzzle with more than 2 Dividers as well.

Although the idea of forcing a parity deduction is there from the start, constructing Puzzle 7 still took 3 hours of trial-and-error, but I'm really glad I managed to do it in the end. While puzzles with symmetries are easier to do because you know the solution must have some kind of symmetry as well to be unique, you can't deny there's beauty in them, and my deduction process doesn't involve uniqueness as a premise, of course.

After designing these puzzles, I played around with other ideas, but ultimately decided to release these puzzles as is.

Playtesting, Discussions & Thoughts After Release

I know that playtesting is essential for puzzle creation, though I definitely didn't try to go for "professional" playtesting, I just posted the set on Steam where my online friends can see, and also on the two thinky games discord servers. People were really kind for trying it out, some of them are even people that I consider to be the "big names" in the circle, including the designer of the very Abdec I mentioned above. Thank you all so much for playing!

Most feedback are simple remarks of approval like "very nice", which I'm definitely grateful for, regardless of whether they are spoken out of basic courtesy. There are also some people who discussed their logic with me, and I did change the final puzzle slightly after the fact to try to force the deduction I had in mind. Some even shared some thoughts about how they feel about the ruleset, such as its strengths and limitations, and some possible future directions this could take, which were all fun discussions to be had.

Firstly, one of the playtesters mentioned that there is an existing puzzle type that's very similar called Running Trail, the only difference being that Running Trail includes "the loop has to pass every empty cell" as a rule, and there's no given line segments. I can see how this rule would make puzzle construction easier in many regards, since the player can easily start some local deductions in corners or edges, and it can be very useful everywhere too. But I'm also glad that I didn't know about this, because the interesting global deductions I want to show, like "deducing the length of each segment" mentioned above, would become trivial under this rule, so I think I can say I came up with something unique on my own.

Another player mentioned a problem with the ruleset, which I sorta noticed during development. The ruleset is kinda imbalanced if you look at it in a certain way. There are the dots, lines and walls, these are all pretty local constraints, typically used for forcing unique solutions if every other method fails. This makes it so that, while the Dividers did provide some interesting global deductions, there is simply no complements for it to create a nice rhythm of global and local deductions, leading to a somewhat monotonous solving strategy, which is "always start with deducing the lengths" I mentioned above. Then what's left are, essentially, just trivial local deductions.

I was indeed not sure how to continue designing interesting puzzles with this ruleset without adding other complementary rules, that's what I mean by "I sorta noticed".

I feel like Puzzle 1 & 2 are especially interesting in this regard, in that the local deduction part of those actually feels interesting to me. I guess it is because figuring out "what the true length of each segment is" is not possible from the start, so the local deductions feel more relevant. While the later puzzles do kinda feel like the same thing over and over again. I hope I at least showed some interesting and different starting deductions.

Also, some players rightfully pointed out what I've mentioned before: half of these puzzles have symmetrical layouts, so the players could easily assume the solution to be symmetrical. But I didn't think too far beyond that: as a result, it could easily feel like needing to do everything twice.

I think in my case it's a bit "justified" because I really don't know how to make the local deductions fun in some later puzzles, so might as well make it symmetrical, easy and beautiful. But now I also see why that could seem even less interesting to some people, something to keep in mind.

But in the end, I'm happy with what I got. This IS my first time designing puzzles after all, and I didn't want it to become unnecessarily complicated, so much so that it escapes my control. So this is really the best I could do at this point in time.

Closing Thoughts

So here you go, an overly lengthy essay for an extremely short paper puzzle set. Thank you for reading this far!

I've written hundreds of long form reviews for games before, including a lot of puzzle games, so lengthy essays aren't unfamiliar to me. You can check my itch page for more info. But this is my first time discussing my thoughts as an actual designer, I still feel nervous about it haha.

I would hope this is only the start of my puzzle design journey, but no promise here. Either way, I still wish to continue contributing to the puzzle game community, or just gaming community as a whole, in ways that I'm capable of.

That's it, hope you had a good time reading!