How I designed the puzzles for Sorting Center Savant
@lex asked me what my technique is for creating puzzles and then recommended I make a post about it. So here it is! You should probably play up to level 6 (and maybe level 9) of Sorting Center Savant to understand what I'm talking about here.
Most of my design theory came from a video called “What Makes a Good Puzzle?” by Game Maker’s Toolkit. To summarize, it’s all about creating a “catch”, where the player thinks the level is impossible because of some sort of contradiction. (I need to do A and B, but doing A prevents me from doing B.) To overcome the contradiction, the player must come to some new revelation about the game’s mechanics.
I applied this in level 6, where the catch is that you need to activate the blue fans to move the A crate into its respective chute, but doing so pushes the B crate off the edge of the level. The revelation is that you can use that right side B crate to shield the left side B crate from being pushed by the blue fans. The rightmost B chute is there to create the assumption that you should use it to collect that right side B crate. But if you solve the level correctly, that chute is never used. Consider how much easier the level would be without that chute there to guide the player into a false assumption.
When filling out the set of levels, I tried to come up with the catch first and then design a level that exploited it. For level 4, I knew before I started what the catch would be. It was just a matter of playing around with it on graph paper until I came up with something that made the revelation a requirement to beat the level without making it too obvious that it’s what you need to do.
For the last four levels, I didn’t start with the catch, I just had a vague concept for the level. I came up with some elements interacting with each other in interesting ways (like a laser that’s the same color as a fan), then I put it into the game and played around with it. The catches evolved from there. I would see which kinds of board states I could achieve that would require clever use of the game's mechanics and then adjust the level to make that board state the goal. And if achieving that board state is too trivial, I would try to throw a wrench into the player’s plans that made that trivial solution impossible. Or I would add new things to make new board states possible. In level 9, the cyan fan is the last thing I added, since I wanted the end board state to be that the yellow fan has been moved downward. Adding the cyan fan was a cool way to make that possible.
Level 11 was a particularly lucky one. I didn’t edit it whatsoever after constructing it in-game. I just had a feeling it was beatable despite not actually having proof that it was. It took me a good fifteen minutes of playing around until I figured it out!
I recommend watching the Game Maker's Toolkit video, since it talks about some other good stuff as well, such as how to come up with the game's base mechanics. I could probably make my game's puzzles even better according to that video if I had more time. I think I could do more work designing an assumption for the solution and make the puzzles involve fewer elements. But good puzzle design is time consuming!
If you would like to try your own hand at this very process, Sorting Center Savant has support for custom levels! See the game's page for instructions. If you do make a level, please post it! Happy puzzling!
