Erk. Good puzzle levels are the ones that DON'T require being super speedy, super dexterous, and aren't risky. Puzzle-solving is all about being able to relax and take your time enough to ponder a mysterious set-up and what you should do with it. What you need, to start with, is a list of puzzle-mechanisms in other games, then you could eliminate any you don't think you could implement, try to think of clever or humorous twists on them, and then finally assemble them into puzzles and sort the puzzles out by complexity and difficulty.

The most basic puzzle mechanism is a destructible barrier: I am here, goal is there, object is blacking the only path. This can be different kinds of objects, and the objects can be destroyed by different actions of the player character, depending on what tools and inherent abilities the character has.

Second most basic puzzle mechanism is hiding the goal, or a necessary subgoal like a key or a switch, inside/behind a destructible object. There could also be multiple keys or switches behind multiple destructible objects, or it might be necessary to collect all the items of a set, for example, oh, a statue of every sign of the zodiac.

Next step up, simple pattern recognition. Perhaps you need to light all the torches which make a square, but not the one which isn't part of the shape. Perhaps you need to press switches A B and C in the correct order.

Now add in another basic element, the ability to move objects around. Now you can slide blocks to make stairs, push a trampoline to a useful position, push balls that will roll down hill gaining speed until they smash a barrier, or a button that won't stay pushed unless you put a weight on it, or a button which you have to turn on and off at different points to make other puzzle elements work.

More complex, either multiple objects need to be slid in the right order or you need to use one object to get another to the correct position like ice blocks that slide as far as they can instead of a single square, or you need to do container math to get an equal amount of water in each of three containers, or all 3 objects to the opposite side of the river without any eating the other, or a towers of hanoi puzzle. Or you have 3 buttons and 5 panels and each button flips two panels and you need to get all 5 panels to match. Or a tangram or tri-ominos type tile rotation puzzle.

Then you can add complexity to get into systems of gears and rotating rooms, hydraulics and floodable rooms, , windmills and waterwheels, furnaces and boilers, ropes and pulleys, weights and balances, magnets or gravity control, modifiable tracks for rolling or sliding objects, prisms or mirrors that must be aligned properly to transmit a beam of light or defract it to a desired color.

Commonly, these are made less straightforward by having a broken or missing piece and a replacement must be found and/or a tool must be used. This expands easily into recipes: you have a cannon and a wall, but you need to find a cannonball and some gunpowder and a source of fire to use the cannon to knock down the barrier. Or an NPC won't help you unless you bring them bread, but the baker has left town so you have to find his recipe book, gather all the ingredients, bake the bread, then finally give it to the NPC.

Now if you give the playable character some kind of distance weapon (boomerang, slingshot, arrows, fire arrows, bomb arrows, ice spell, lightning spell, wind spell, etc.) you can add things that need to be done here while the player is there, or unorthodox ways to act where you can't go or transport yourself where you couldn't otherwise go (grappling hook, suction cups, sticky/magnetic boots, helpful animals, growable plants.)

I am also interested in this topic, but I am just talking out of the blue.

I think there are three part of puzzle solving:

1) Understanding the syntax and vocabulary of the puzzle
2) Formulating a solution after knowing the syntax, using the available words
3) Execute the solution

I think that the focus of a puzzle game could be on any of mix of the three parts. Part 1 is characterized by experimenting, it is a puzzle on obtaining knowledge. Part 2 is characterized by mental simulation and manipulation of known information. Part 3 is characterized by manifesting knowledge in a physical form.

Chess is a "puzzle" game that focuses on Part 2.
Sokoban also focuses on Part 2.
Tetris focuses heavier on Part 3, where speed of action matters.

Part 1 includes recognizing that a puzzle exist, learning what the goal is and discovering the dynamics related to the puzzle. But I can't think of a game at the moment that focuses heavily on this. Usually, in a game, the learning phrase is fast and obvious. I think that jigsaw puzzle is actually of this type, where the bulk of the "puzzle" is of figuring out where the puzzle piece should go; after knowing what that piece is, the solution and execution are trivial.

Riddles are also Type 1 puzzles, where the bulk of the work is to figure out the correct way of reading the riddle. Once you see got the correct interpretation of the riddle, your original search space expands to the new context, and the expanded search space has the solution.

Have you seen braid its a 2d platformer that deals with time manipulation (where you can rewind time, slow down time, time reversal).

Quote:Original post by EmpyrealHell

Quote:Original post by sunandshadow

Wow. You know, when you you say it seems so obvious. That was actually really helpful. I'm gonna hit the designer again and see if I can put some of that to use. Thanks!

Glad it was helpful - I was also glad you asked your question because I never sat down and wrote out a list of puzzle elements before, and it will be a useful thing to stick into my own game development paperwork. That's by no means a complete list - my housemate was just saying something to me about conveyor belt puzzles, which I didn't mention although it's basically the same as slides/tubes/train tracks. Also I was thinking remembering the use of balloons in The Incredible Machine, and hole-digging in Lemmings...

[Edited by - sunandshadow on January 11, 2009 5:38:53 PM]