first

HOW IS IT 3 HOURS AGO WHEN IT WAS JUST RELEASED??

A small suggestion for your platforming part. Platforming could work as a pallet cleanser between puzzles, BUT I would suggest you have either no fail state or the price of failure being very low. The reward would be FUN and QUICK platforming. For example: if you have a platforming section where you propel yourself with magnets, maybe doing midair maneuvers to get to faster "lanes" so if you do it right you go faster. There is no fail state since the worst the player can do is just go slower, but there is still a small skill component to keep it interesting and fun.

The "stick around to find out!" garbage reminded me of old buzzfeed-style clickbait. Ruined an otherwise respectable video.

How big was the spider really

It's super hard when your a solo developer. Having a couple team members to knock some sense into you is always helpful.

You could also just take a break from design and test it a day later or so, though it's not quite as efficient

Try playing a fair game of poker with yourself. If you do not have multiple personality disorder... there is no way to blend other infos out.

this could be applied to any game type: "you [the developer] are the worst judge of your game" whether that be the readability of your level design (is that climbable or just decoration), the animations of your enemies (is that an attack or just an itchy nose, can I dodge/parry what is the window), the difficulty of your puzzles, is this upgrade actually interesting/impactful/meaningful (take 5% less damage, so I can take 102% of the damage that enemy deals thanks...) if you have the same testers constantly testing your game they could be 'too good' at your puzzles, combat, control scheme (Alien Resurrection for reinventing dual stick FPS controls before Halo evolved combat) leading to a question of "did I make it too easy if the testers are getting through too quickly"

Puzzles generally. (Though there's even an issue if you're using 'people who are very experienced with sudoku' to test your sudoku. What your testers tell you 'oh this is a really elegant use of this ruleset. 10-20 minutes. This might work with folk who've never seen this puzzle type before' might take someone who's never seen that ruleset before three hours to solve. (Not kidding. This happened to me fairly recently with a puzzle I set.) - Assessing the difficulty of a puzzle is an absolute nightmare.)

Cheers Jose!

As a civil engineer for decades now, I still sometimes struggle with preparing shop drawings that will accurately, simply and succinctly communicate the design intent of a system that I will have sometimes spent months iterating on. It's easy to assume that the people using your plans have more knowledge of the final product and the intricacies that shaped the design than they might actually have. Getting feedback from the project manager and supervisors is helpful in learning how to better convey the required information and sometimes even simplifying aspects of the final design.

Thanks for sharing good to hear AAA devs make the same mistakes as us inides!

That makes me think of when Suzaku from code geass says he doesn't have trust in people, just systems It's like no matter how good you are at game dev you're still jusr a person. So what's important is setting up a system, a feedback loop, and having that system inform the game development process. Because a system (or plan) is easier to stick to and hold yourself accountable to than nebulous ideas about how a game should be made. Interesting

As a QA analyst who entered a level design contest for Mega Man some time ago, I encountered this when I put together my entry. I was told that some of the mechanics I'd used weren't taught to the player very well, and that I might need to add some antepieces or other teaching moments for the players. Thankfully I saw the testers' point, and even though these mechanics are very heavily used in the series, a player who'd never encountered them before might not know how they worked. Plus it allowed me to show off some of the more unusual things I was doing with the mechanic before players encountered those twists "in the wild", so to speak. I ended up placing fairly well in that contest (on my first ever try at such a thing), and a lot of it was due to listening to feedback like that.

Such a simple, exponentially long puzzle

Omg, is Tower of Hanoi considered a puzzle game? lol. I agree with you tedious implementations are generally terrible. If I am almost certain I can complete a level without any enlightenment but have to grind through the whole thing looking out for inconsequential details that could screw me over along the way, then I probably just give up.

@@me___5796 It's not so much a 'game' in and of itself, but Towers of Hanoi is a puzzle. And it's one that I've seen in some form or another in many games throughout the years as a puzzle among many other puzzles (usually in mid-tier action explorers). [Note that sometimes it's pretty well-disguised]. I get *why* it's in a lot of those sorts of games. Because it's easy to implement and easy to solve. It's like a maze. (Does a maze count as a puzzle?) But whenever I encounter it in a game, I just sigh with distain. I'd rather there just be no puzzle than do Towers of Hanoi again.

wait, really? I thought those puzzles were kinda cool. In the case of towers of hanoi, it definitely becomes unnecessarily tedious, but thats just because the solution is pretty much an algorithm you just repeat over and over and over again. If thats what you mean, then yeah I get it, but puzzles such as the ball-following puzzles in Crosscode I found super satisfying even if the solution was rather easy to figure out but required a large sequence of actions that required timing and precision. If you want to know what I'm talking about, you can find the longest and most notable of these puzzles here: ukposts.info/have/v-deo/bYKIYWxqfnyAyXk.html (not really a spoiler if you have no clue whats going on) That being said, there are numerous comments under that video that complain about the exact puzzle I'm talking about. I personally loved almost every puzzle in crosscode and I guess I just don't understand how it may be frustrating. The video even does some sections in a weird order and still got it, which makes me question the comments that claim they aren't fast or coordinated enough to do it. I guess I'm just really good at puzzles?

Quantum Conundrum too

psychologically, i fell like that makes a lot of sense. thanks for sharing that perspective as i think it really does posit a nice alternative to mark’s approach - which also seems intuitive at first glance but, as you’ve pointed out, can have obvious problems in terms of feedback.

In fact that's the way on how many Focus Groups test works for a variety of industries and products.

It wasn't *just* Portal 2. ukposts.info/have/v-deo/cYmgoaeiZ3lnzHk.html

Valve also integrates playtesting into the core development cycle. The first iteration of the original Half-Life was so bad that they had to completely scrap it and start from scratch. The Half-Life we know and love was the result having the second iteration of the game constantly playtested during development. Since then, they have weekly playtest sessions of all of their games, administered by the developers themselves.

I wonder if this was the inspiration for Mark's video on how Valve playtests.

Honestly not sure how you get into game design without coming to have this opinion. Though I'm not in game design so what do i know

But always, ALWAYS give the player some way to start the level over. Even if there's no way to get stuck, players will MAKE a way to get themselves stuck.

​@@Tigersight0 only example that doesn't do that would be the Portal games, which are really hard to softlock yourself in. I mean, if you lose a key component, they just, give you another one. Pretty hard to lose there. They actually give you an achievement if you figure out a way to do it.

​@@leaffinite3828 just playing devils advocate here but a possible reason some puzzle games include the potential to get ireverseably stuck on a puzzle is because it takes aditional time and money to make that not the case. Nowadays the standards for game development have risen substantially and so this game dev opinion is basically a given for making puzzle game. Everything looks obvious in hindsight

@Vinicius Dugue thats fair, though im not sure if its advocating my comments devil if that makes sense.

I like that approach a lot, though I feel this is best fit for finding optional secret areas

I get the sense that you had an example in mind when you made this comment. Care to share?

That’s actually really good if you can pull that off. And the players who do find that quirky mechanic probably won’t be too bothered by the one “useless” level since they’ll be quick to solve it and see it as somewhat of a short breather.

@@hoodiesticks the entrance to the area in the bottom-right corner of hollow knight is one example.

being accidentally rewarded with a secret is unsatisfying to me, but a piece of knowledge is different somehow. Go figure.

Yea but alot of the time the second puzzle is still really easy and there isn’t always even a second room.

This is a common thing in Nintendo puzzles, the idea of the four-step puzzle. You start with a simple implementation of it, something very basic. Then, you have the player do something a bit more complicated. Do that four times,, upping the complexity each time, to ease the player into the element, and now they'll know what to do when you spring it on them in future.

the best part is, if your puzzle is "too easy" it often ends up just being a trick question people will assume that's not the answer to the question, so they'll try something harder, and then when they finally realize it was right there they laugh at themselves and it's a grand old time

I mean, bottom line, what's worse : a puzzle that players find too easy, or a puzzle that players get stuck on ?

@@jeandouyeth6682 Totally. The nice thing about D&D as opposed to game dev, too, is that a DM can dynamically adjust things on a moments notice, and more easily react to the players. If they were let down by how easy it was, you can add complications behind the scenes, or throw in some more combat or something. If it's too hard, you can throw some hints/help their way.

@@jeandouyeth6682 Depends on the type of player methinks. I know people who genuinely enjoy spending hours/days on puzzles and time out of the game to figure things out. On the other hand, I've also run games for people who much prefer puzzles that can be solved within 10 to 15 minutes and serve a narrative purpose. I'd think that question is probably a lot more challenging for video game devs since they'd be trying to appeal to a much larger audience as opposed to a DM/GM who runs a game for 3 to 6 people. Especially since odds are good the DM/GM already knows the preferences of their players if they've been running the sessions long enough.

I always laugh at the meme of “puzzles for babies, by a DM”

Like a fun final challenge

Or hidden levels you need to find?

Bonus levels!

You can have them hidden behind breakable walls or secret passages in levels and leading to some optional collectables. Kind of like some of the grub rooms in Hollow Knight or the strawberries in Celeste.

Perhaps as a Free DLC? So people who don't care for that won't even see them.

until you get too good at swapping hands xD Absolutely agree though, it's like you become a beginner once you swap hands!

A great gift, especially from someone with a background in game design. I know I’d struggle not being overly critical in a similar position.

That's what I was thinking, real-time feedback is the best especially when you can't help them and have to watch them struggle. Emotionally horrifying, but priceless.

The trouble is, I agree about needing hand-holdy tutorials. As for overall level of challenge, it depends entirely on your target audience. Do you want younger or gaming-inexperienced players to finish the game? That's totally fine... But that means experienced players aren't going to enjoy it. Like the video said, he wasn't targeting the people who loved Baba is You and and rocked every level. Personally, I find that most 'puzzle' games are tailored towards very inexperienced players, and that means they're very, very easy, and that's just no fun. "inbento" is a great example: it's an adorable game, I love the character of it, and not a single puzzle took me more than a few seconds of staring at what I had available before I 'solved' it, because every set of puzzles was a very basic mechanic that built slightly on itself and never, ever actually presented a challenge.

​​​​@@softxpandguest708 you hit the nail on the head. Is it a puzzle game built for people who play puzzle games, or a puzzle game built for people who don't play puzzle games. What confuses me with this whole video though is why is he trying to target people who don't play puzzle games? They aren't likely going to be the ones looking for it unless he's just relying on his YT following to buy it. I think it's a poor strategy overall unless you're actively trying to introduce new people to a genre. Better to know your audience and have samples from the target audience playtest, not your dad

You also know all the answers from the start which skews your perception of the balance. This doesn't just apply to puzzle games either. Let me cite what I think is one of the most egregious design oversights in popular gaming history: the path up to Undead Burg in Dark Souls 1. Yeah, you may scoff, but _countless_ gamers have reached Firelink Shrine and managed to completely miss the stairway up the cliff to the aquaduct in favour of either blundering into the graveyard leading to the Catacombs (and getting torn apart by hordes of high level skeletons) or stumbling down into New Londo Ruins and getting slaughtered by invincible ghosts, because those two paths are far more obvious than the cliffside path leading to the _first_ half of the game. Then they assume that the whole game is as hard as those two late-game areas (since Dark Souls already had a reputation of being super-hard) and get frustrated and quit. Believe me, it happens more than you might think- in fact I think it happened to me the first time I tried playing, I had to come back to it later. The problem was that the level designers _knew_ which way to go before the way to go even existed, so they failed to make that way as easily noticeable as the other two (you had to run towards what looked from a distance like a blank cliff, compared to going through the big water courtyard where Frampt will eventually arise, or going down the obvious staircase past Anastacia's cage). Every time you get lost in a game because it isn't properly telegraphing where you need to go next, that's probably because the developer (who already KNOWS the answer) thinks it's self-evident and doesn't need to be more obvious, because they're afraid of being _too_ obvious and insulting their players' intelligence (another, more old-school, example I can think of is Lufia and the Fortress of Doom for the SNES, which has one of the worst laid-out world maps I've ever seen with far too much open space and not nearly enough landmarks, and too vague directions given about where your next objective is, especially once you get the ship and have access to the ENTIRE world map via the ocean).

I think 2D mario games figured out tutorials perfectly. the goomba checks if you can jump, and gives you a prompt only if you can’t. Most players don’t even know that prompt exists because we don’t need it. The first level teaches you ALOT of mechanics and you don’t even notice you’re being taught.

I like this comment-- particularly the end line-- as it highlights another step of that process that most game makers don't like to talk about or admit: players are the users, but they aren't the experts. You need player feedback to figure out how best to serve them, but they don't know how to serve themselves. Players will tell you what they find frustrating. But that doesn't mean you change what they don't like. At least not right away. A classic example: inventory limits that force you out of the main loop to send you back to town in an ARPG. Players will demand unlimited inventory space in games like that because they find that interruption frustrating. But as the expert, you know they actually need the downtime to appreciate the uptime. And you've got to slow them down so they don't devour everything and feel bad for having gorged themselves. Players don't understand that those design choices, even if apparently frustrating, serve a higher purpose. They don't realize that if they got what they were asking for, they'd be worse off.

It's like that part in the Menu where he asks the food reviewer the cook and he cooks the most uncooked shit ever haha

Have you tried it yet? If not, you should start right now.

It's just a skill, you can become good at it

What u mean

Fear is not the spider you see on the wall. It’s the spider you no longer see on the wall when you look back again.

Fair point, fair point.

Another big part of that was the games being rooted in quarter-munching arcade machines. At risk of being a "back in my day" yells-at-cloud gamer here, punishing execution challenges were just the norm in game design at the time that arcade gamers expected when we got home, the only difference being the continues didn't cost us 25 cents a pop. Also, Mike Tyson's Punch-Out was the original Soulslike.

@@SimuLord Even for home console games, they needed to justify the price of a game by making it last longer, and the cheapest way to do that is to make it stupidly hard. You could breeze through most retro games if they were easy because they don’t have a lot of content

@@thedapperdolphin1590 Which in turn invites the question, "what's better? Padding your game by making it stupid hard or padding your game by making it an Ubisoft game?" In other words, what's worse, mindless tedium in the name of 100% completion or controller-breaking frustration in the name of beating the game at all?

I think the reason was that they were extremely short, like, 30 minutes long to cover the whole game. And they were expensive as hell, "60 $ for 30 minutes? Are you nuts???" So they were extremely hard to cover for the lack of content. Take Sifu, for example. Sifu can be finished in about 2 hours, its 5 levels are great, there is content, but it unveils itself as you become more skillful. The game is hard, but naturally hard, not artificially. Artificially hard is "Nintendo hard", "battletoads hard" or else, naturally hard is when you have fair rules in the game and you know you can succeed, just need to roll a little earlier, or change your tactic. Old games rarely had such space for gameplay.

@@SimuLord Ubi game at least doesn't milk your nerves, you just play until you're interested. And they also make giant worlds, so you discover for as long as you want, you don't have to finish 100%, you can just finish the main story, for example. But yeah, both aren't that good :)

That's a problem with every skill. Being knowledgeable about something doesn't mean being good at it.

Then what I like about Jonathan Blow's puzzles is that they're basically designed as: "there's an interesting idea, and I wrapped it in a puzzle to help you understand." I love the moment in the Witness where you come out of that tiny starting area, see the door with several starts exits and a bunch of dots and are completely stumped, then by solving those two little sequences of puzzles on the side, which you really don't have to think THAT hard about you suddenly understand how to solve the puzzle at the door. The satisfaction comes less from "I solved this hard thing" and more from "I understand this concept now", but understanding such a concept can simply be difficult.

@@ledumpsterfire6474 With puzzle games gaining the knowledge how to solve the game, is the game.

@@PauLtus_B Making puzzles and solving puzzles are pretty fundamentally different skills, as counter intuitive as that seems. Ask any puzzle game fan to design a puzzle for your game, and unless they've had experience doing it before, it's going to be nonsense and probably not fun at all.

As someone with a wikipedia level of notes, it can't be understated just how much knowledge is just lost with time no matter how much you care about it. Most of us are forgetful. The more hats that you wear the more time you have to forget everything and the less time you have to just check notes, no matter how organized they may be. We tend to believe that what we've experienced has been experienced but I can't be the only person who has a long series that they go back to every year and still forgets basically everything that happens and is surprised more often than not by the things that I've absolutely seen before. I just had a much better memory as a child so I can't really get surprised by the things that I experienced back then, even now. As more information comes out surrounding long covid and the fact that one of the outcomes of long covid is something that's not unique to covid.. I'm pretty sure that a really bad 2 week case of pneumonia early on in High School that I legitimately thought was going to kill me left me in the state that I'm in. Every time that I've had Covid I feel like I never fully recover and then I wind up catching it again. Even the vaccines have the exact same impact on me.

I love what Rayman Legends did with the timed challenges and shadow you levels. Added a lot of content and challenge for those who have mastered the game

Well in all fairness if you contribute to a game jam, you wont really have the time to flesh every last detail out Buuuut something that can be done is using ideas you got while making your jam game and polishing those up if you like them enough

Jam games are literally never well balanced for difficulty. They're either easy as hell or seemingly impossible. They're really just meant to be a demonstration of an idea though, so that's not unreasonable.

@@ledumpsterfire6474 The reason is obviously jam games get so little time so some things will have to be left ignored/unpolished, difficulty is an easy one especially for a game that will probably be quite short

Jam games are a bit like NaNo novels. You just build it, then you fix it later if you decide it's worth seeing through beyond that rushed initial proof-of-concept.

@@RandomHandle837 Not to mention that most experienced devs are working professionally and don't really have time or want to do jams, so most of what you have left are indies who don't have a lot of experience or skill, and a jam game will often only have a couple or few of those people working on it.

"How To Pitch To Your Parents", and "How to Get Your Parents To Do QA Testing" would both make awesome videos IMO

Rather than jealously, you should feel hatred 😊

"what the fuck is this shit? I don't have time"

I could hand a game I'm building to my parents, but I don't know how much value the feedback would have since neither of them have even looked at a video game since...oh, probably 1997, when my younger brother moved out and went to college.

@@ilovecairns5181 Yes, this is the path to the dark side.

Understanding game better than game designer may be fun too. Look what speedrunners do for example.

Players will often overestimate their abilities, skip tutorials, and get stuck. I have watched a friend install a new game, fiddle with the controls before playing, and get mad that the controls were strange, he still maintains that the game has awful controls.

@@peacedustinc.7108 But at that point they'll hate it no matter what you do. Have a forced tutorial and the game is treating them like a baby. Instead of catering to that specific group of players, which will probably hate it anyway, it's better to cater to the majority of people that will play your game. And a significant part of that are players that are already familiar with the genre. Partially optional tutorials allows the largest group to get the most out of it, and makes replays significantly more berable.

Sometimes harder puzzles are just too similar to the original, take Portal 1's advanced chambers as an example, they aren't particularly difficult as it is just the same thing, but with a few twists, that slow you down for a minute or two.

A words of wisdom ;-)

Have a kid and you'll understand this Curse intimately. 😂 Go into it thinking out how you're gonna teach a fresh soul how to read and tie shoes and multiply fractions..."how can I do that? I'm not a teacher!"...inevitably find yourself trying to assemble a tutorial level of *The Steps Of Blowing Your Nose Into A Tissue And Then Throwing It Away,* or *How To **_Not_** Pick Up Something That's Too Heavy To Lift* ... Most of my (very dated) game dev experience had to do with kiddie games -- Dora the Explorer and whatnot -- and an amusing/frustrating facet to this Curse when approaching products for little kids is that both the devs expectations for player ability, and _actual_ player ability vary _wildly..._ even if you've only got two buttons and a joystick, you've gotta go into it knowing some of your players are likely going to be literally still developing the understanding of the _concept_ of cause & effect, let alone button-press-causes-effect-on-screen, let alone have any prior knowledge scaffold for main-button-is-generally-affirmative and smaller-button-is-generally-cancellation... 😅 On the plus side you get a LOT of practice breaking through your preconceived notions of What My Players Need... (minus side you'll be reflexively making "Swiper No Swiping" jokes for decades).

Finally found someone mention this here.

@@bsidethebox You're reminding me of my middle school math classes. Actually, just my school days in general. In my high school days, I was always complaining to myself about how bad teachers were with avoiding this bias.

Same here!

You're describing exactly how I felt! And so if this video is any indication, please try and get a demo of your "simple" game in front of people and see what they actually think!

@@GMTK Yeah, I'll be sure to. The block I've hit recently myself is, I've been trying to make a Metroidvania and thoughts like "Is this room too hallway-esque?" and "Is it alright if I go a while without introducing new mechanics? How do I make these rooms feel different? Will the player even make it far before getting bored?" The problem I hit that you didn't though is, I've felt a sort of creative block when it comes to adding "more" to an area. It's hard to think of something really complex that just... works. Even if your puzzles were too complex, you make it look so easy coming up with so many creative and interesting ideas that iterate on eachother. Really makes me wonder if maybe I'm over thinking it. Hoping to just go for it, get some people to play test it, and keep the mindset of "I can make changes to the game design and progression" as I go along.

I took game design classes and dropped out after a few months because I wasn't really learning much but I will always remember something a teacher told me: your goal is not to beat the player.

@@amuro9624 It's the same as a DM in TTRPGs. The goal is to let the players have fun, yourself included.

The hardest part is remembering that you are reverse-engineering your puzzle from the top, where your players will be engaging it from first principles and from the bottom.

Tutorial is merged with the game. Same for Half-Life. It is hard to implement, but it's the best option.

I don't think it's "90% tutorial". More like, the tutorial of the game prolongs within the game and they are adding more and more mechanics, so you always have to keep up and kind of never stop learning new stuff. Inscryption is the same. You play, you die, then you're taught there are bones, then there is also something new, but what you play isn't the tutorial, you play the game, they're just adding new mechanics on top of each other.

@@sdjhgfkshfswdfhskljh3360 Lol, we said the same :) And then I read your comment. This is indeed the best way to introduce new mechanics and keep players engaged and entertained.

​@Sasha Bagdasarow That... is what a tutorial is. At least what a good tutorial is. When you're learning as you play, and the game itself is teaching you new mechanics, that is the definition of a tutorial, and a damn good one at that.

100% agree ! A game must be clear enough (at least in its first levels) to show you what to do and how to do. I have been working on my own platformer for 2 years now and I have added many more "simple" levels and help elements than I first thought after watching friends trying it. What is clear for you isn't the case for everyone !

I mean, presumably, part of that 2 hour video was providing feedback, not just solving the puzzles :P

@@dusklunistheumbreon I mean, of course, but even if it were 50% discussion it still took an expert 100% of the expected time to finish a game intended for a general audience.

Hard games are fine too.

@@sdjhgfkshfswdfhskljh3360 That's not the point. Fundamentally speaking, anything you make will be exponentially easier for you than it will be for an inexperienced player, and the exact amount can fluctuate depending on the target audience.

​@@MizunoKetsuban I understood the idea. But with such approach there will be no games for gamers, who are more experienced than game designer himself.

..who's Velmark?

Oh my god, for mobile player grandmas?

Lmaoooo i came looking for this comment

/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ this link brought to me to another video. Could someone help me find it pls?

So this is what it feels like. LMAO, this is actually genius I thought I was being clever by typing it out myself only to get rickrolled

never gonna forget that XcQ 😂

He went to San Francisco, home of some of the best seafood in the world and also home to the OG Mission burrito (the foil-wrapped delight that in its original form is the greatest way yet devised to indulge in the second deadly sin), and ate instead at the most overrated burger chain in all of Christendom. If he ever goes to PAX, I hope he's nice enough to ask us all for restaurant recommendations. I can point him to great places in both the Seattle area (where I live now) and the Boston area (where I grew up.) We'll see what he thinks of American food after crowdsourcing the locals.

Yeah, I thought that was pretty funny. The British are sort of notorious for having bland food and having stolen just about everything good they have from other cultures.

Right? If he was French or Italian or Japanese or Indian, I wouldn't say a word. Like I don't necessarily agree in some of those cases, but it's a fair take. But beans on toast over here gonna talk shit on *American* food? He's just mad because he's not used to his food having flavor.

Yes i love these videos so much😅

I'm not a game designer, just a curious one and a lifetime gamer. I think one possible issue to complex puzzles is that the more stuff you add, more messy it becomes, and the problem is not the puzzles being too hard (take The Witness, for example, it has hard puzzles), I believe the problem is that the puzzles become messy and hard to understand. If I was making a game, I would possibly keep the hard puzzles, but make them as simple as possible, not as easy as possible, if what I say makes sense. You for sure have more experience in designing games, but I think the key is the simplicity and clarity, not the ease.

Also fuckin well done on the Rick Roll 🤣

Top tier game there! Impressive job!

@@kaingagame4351 Thanks so much!

Dome Keeper OST rocks! hope we see more of your work.

@@l0rdfr3nchy7 Thank you! 💚 I hope so too 😅

Those levels work fine in the main game - once all the mechanics are taught and players get used to levels that gradually increase in difficulty. He just started the game with a difficulty that was too hard

This!!

Yeah, the times in puzzle games where I've really gotten into the convoluted crunchy stuff it's at the end. I love a good red herring if I've had a chance to learn the skills that let me recognize it as a red herring. Enough success along the way that when I get stuck I think "what am I forgetting/missing" rather than "I can't do this."

Eh. "Do the same thing three times" as it sounds like some of those convoluted puzzle designs came down to doesn't make a puzzle harder, just take longer to solve. I recall a Scott Stro Solves video from before he transitioned to mostly doing Wordle variants, where he's doing a physical puzzle, something relating to wooden 2d wine bottles. And it looked like a really good for 2-3 wine bottles (the mechanics of the puzzle meant that it wasn't really an interesting problem with a single bottle, since the solution to one bottle gummed up the next one so you needed to have multiple bottles to make it a puzzle, as I recall), but the 7 in the actual puzzle didn't add difficulty* to the puzzle. Just tedium. Since you now know the solution and now just need to apply it another 5 times in a row. *Unless you count 'oops halfway through I accidentally started doing the solution in reverse' which can happen with that sort of physical mechanism puzzles if they get overly long. Red herrings, and the like, can work great, as can adding extra stuff where adding an extra thing to the changes the solution path rather than just making it longer (as in some of the extra Baba Is You puzzles), but 'do the same thing two times within a tight timeframe' like it sounded like some of the puzzles Mark simplified were usually feels like 'artificial difficulty' rather than added challenge imo.

​@@theAstarrr That really depends on the exact puzzles I feel. If your game has 40 puzzles and 10 are much harder than the other 30, it can feel better for players to finish the game and unlocking the 10 bonus levels...than to finish 3/4 of the game and get stuck, never seeing the end of the game.

I think there's two kinds of red herrings - those that are there to just waste your time, and those that just mislead you in how to *use* them. The former generally suck. It's clutter and just distracts the player. Tropes are tools, of course, so sometimes the game will benefit from just a bit of clutter, but most of the time it's something to be avoided. The latter can be very good in the later stages of the game. Baba is You has *multiple* levels where words are used as spacers to push other words around, or as junk to remove obstacles (such as with WATER IS SINK), or where you're using a word in an unusual way, and it deliberately baits you into thinking it's used in the usual way. They generally work well

The latter isn't a red herring.

It's true for a lot of other things too! Sketch a thing not once but a dozen times; take the best 6 and develop those a little further; take the best 2 even further, and then look at the best one and go "OKay, now I know what to do. Let's start with the real painting!"

I write papers at the last possible time while drinking plenty of whiskey.

They also only single-fry their fries. Frozen fries are parfried in the factory.

In-N-Out makes the same mistake a home cook makes when making fries. You cannot simply cut up a potato (by hand or by machine), throw it into hot oil, and expect perfect fries/"chips". That's not how French fries work. You either fry them once at a low temperature (325 F/160 C) before stopping the cooking process (and freezing the fries if you're doing this in a commercial kitchen; the home cook can simply put them on a cooling rack for as long as it takes to heat up the oil for the next step). The "second fry" happens at 375 F/190 C and gets that golden brown crust, like putting a reverse sear on a steak you've already cooked sous vide to the proper internal temperature. Or you cheat. If you soak the potatoes in a sugar-water solution, what you lack in direct cooking of the outside of the fry, you'll make up for via caramelization of the sugar on the outside of the fry, which will get nice and dark at a lower frying temperature and/or the potato's temperature coming up from frozen. Just about every big corporate fast food joint does some variation on this. I'm as passionate about cooking as I am about game design :)

@@Default78334 You can ask them to double-fry them. Much better that way!

those first few puzzles really are vital huh?

@@noahsabadish3812 Yes, the first ones are not so much about solving the puzzle as its about solving the mechanics of the game. If you do not know what you can do, any puzzle can prove almost impossible, so the reward for the first ones is figuring out things you can try to do, then when you get to later levels you have the tools to start really thinking about the puzzle. The alternative is pure tutorials, but tutorials are often skipped, or does not feel as part of the game, by using the first puzzles AS tutorial the game gets bigger and players will not skip them.

This really reminds me of Boneworks, sorry, but in a bad way. Maybe you get me if you played it. The puzzles there are cumbersome, because they are so "structured". I don't feel like something is happening, I feel like an experiment rat that is being put into a maze.

@@sashabagdasarow497 Never played it, but this isn't really a completely rigid structure that I abide by. It functions more like guidelines how not to throw a player into something they can’t solve.

@@indecx1878 yeah, I agree, I guess it's important to keep your points in mind, but without creativity it's not gonna be interesting.

I'd love to see a game use the similarity as part of a narrative. Imagine having to revisit the location and it's become more difficult because some of the mechanisms have worn down and corroded, or the antagonist you need to fight reengineered them to be actively hostile.

a great example of this is Pizza Tower's "Pizzascare"

Celeste B-Side and C-Side

That’s a great point - perhaps AI could fill that role. If you trained a model to the desired skill level, once you stop training it, it should give you fairly repeatable performance. You’d need to have it fairly general though, otherwise you might need to retrain it if you introduce a significant change. I read somewhere that the Total Warhammer team did something similar for balancing their games (though, using more traditional game AI, not neural nets) - basically, have the AI play a lot of simulated battles, and if one faction always comes out on top in otherwise “fair” fights (ex. Same unit cost), then the balance is likely off.

A good QA tester (as in testing is their profession) could probably give you a heads up in most cases if something is likely or potentially going to have a bad design effect. If they regularly manage play testing for example they should know the common hiccups players hit.

@@cristymatthews1189 That's a good point. QA's job is to try and find those kinds of things. Even in my own software dev (not games), they will regularly find things that maybe they could figure out, but wouldn't be obvious to a normal user. And sure enough, I usually agree with them. It's difficult to separate what we know from what others would know. It's definitely a skill that requires practice. Most of us developers don't practice that skill often, but QA certainly does.

Might as well not include any puzzles. Just make a game that requires pressing a single button. Or heck, just make a game that beats itself when you start it up because pressing a button is still too hard and complex.