I Can Finally Talk About My Puzzles

I’ve blogged about programming, art, character design, music, and sounds. But I feel like I missed a crucial part of making a puzzle game…

I didn’t want to give away any solutions, so I haven’t really talked about the puzzles so far. But now that the demo is out, I figured I would share some of the puzzle design process with you!

But wait!

Obviously, this post contains spoilers for the demo, so if you haven’t played it yet, go play it.

Orrrr, if you’d prefer to watch someone else play it, go check out this playthrough by a super awesome YouTuber. His commentary is adorable and very funny. (And even if you have played the demo, go like and comment on his video. Please!! We need to support Little Ghosthunter’s very first Let’s Player.)

Okay, on to the puzzles.

The ones that didn’t change

Some puzzles pretty much stayed the same from the idea stage to the final stage, like the “gaze” puzzle.

And the piano puzzle. I was inspired by MIDI piano videos.

The maze too. I even used the number three, in the colour red. Some puzzles are born perfect.

But some puzzles took some tweaking to get right.

The Flowers

When I initially thought of the concept for the flowers/clocks puzzle, I thought it would be easy. You have to match the colour of flowers to the shape of their vases.

But that would be problematic for colourblind players, and I wanted to make my game accessible to as many people as possible. I ended up making it so the flowers point in different directions, which gave me a great excuse to draw some clocks.

This puzzle stumped the most people during testing. I think it’s because the flowers are so inconspicuous. Maybe if I’d stuck with the original colours idea, they would have been more obvious, especially because of the limited colour palette in the library.

The Bookshelf

The books puzzle was always a sorting puzzle, but at first, I thought it would be alphabetical sorting.

The exact design went through a few iterations, but I apparently only sketched out one of them. I saw a photo on Pinterest of some bookshelves with rows labeled by letter, like in my sketch:

My idea was that the player would have to sort each row according to the author’s last name, like in regular libraries. Then they’d do the whole matching letters to numbers thing. They’d have to pick out a specific book (marked by a blue dot) in a row and look at which number it corresponds to, or the other way around.

Unfortunately, I realised there are too many letters in the alphabet. If I’d really committed to it, that would’ve been 260 book spines for me to draw. I enjoyed designing books, but not that much.

So I decided to just do ten books. And since letters were already used for the clue on the lock, the books couldn’t be sorted according to the alphabet. I remember sitting at my desk searching for ten things with only one reasonable order. There are not many ordered things that aren’t either numbers or letters, but eventually I landed on times of the day.

Also, when I was making the book sorting mechanic, I accidentally made them giant.

The Perspective Puzzle

This puzzle seems to be the most controversial one in the game. It’s intuitive to some people, but too difficult for others, and a few can’t even be bothered to attempt it. I don’t think it’s a hard puzzle, but I think it’s hard to present it in a way that makes it seem simple.

When I was designing this puzzle, I had to double check that all of my silhouettes were correct. So I downloaded Blender and recreated the puzzle in 3D.

See, the puzzle is easy when you actually have the object in front of you. It’s just difficult to make that in a 2D game. What do you think? Should I let players play with a 3D object and see the solution for themselves? Or do you think the power of imagination is enough?

Anyway, maybe some of these puzzles will change in the future. Maybe I’ll make them harder, or easier. Probably easier. I’ve caused too many headaches.