Puzzles, like most role-playing games, can also focus on stories and visuals. They may be used to enhance a plot and amplify a story. Good puzzles for free can also give you more information about characters and the world they live in, while bad ones can detract you from an account and bring you to a screeching halt.
Here are some things that you to keep in mind when developing a puzzle:
- Establish a Setting
Your puzzle should fit in your natural game world. To do this, you need to establish a setting and develop a list of possible threats and obstacles that you can place in the player’s path. If you’re using a cave setting, you might think of using darkness as an obstacle. In this case, your players will need to find a light to solve the puzzle. To formulate this light, you may need to take the player through the process of generating it. The light should also be sustainable, and as the player moves to higher levels, you could add more obstacles to put out the light.
- Interweave Setting and Characters
The best puzzles shouldn’t only challenge the player and help them learn more about the characters and setting. You can borrow settings from various environments that exist in the world. However, you shouldn’t be limited to only that because you can also use imaginative settings. Movies and virtual reality have used imaginary scenes in the past with success, and you can even succeed.
So as you form your puzzle, it would help if you explore different environments and character motivations.
An excellent example of a set is that of ancient ruins. You can create a spirit that obstructs the path of a player demanding an offering to its god. But because the player already knows that their god is friends with a fire mage who’s the player’s party member, he casts a basic fire spell to appease the spirit, allowing him to pass. This is an idea of how you can amplify characters and settings into your puzzle.
- Empathize With the Player
It’s good to be fair to the player as a designer. It’s needless to design a puzzle that requires arcane knowledge that the player can easily miss. It would be best if you availed the tools to solve the puzzle and not place the solution to the puzzle further geographically and chronologically.
Avoid asking the player to use comments made in previous levels or acts in the story to find solutions for higher levels. Besides, you also don’t want to hold information because it may make the player feel cheated. If the player can’t also solve the puzzle without failing, you need to rethink your approach.
- Provide Clear Directions
Your puzzle should be sensible to the player. It would help if you guided them towards finding a solution by offering them little clues along the way. Avoid confusing directions because they may make the player feel stupid or the game unfair. The puzzle shouldn’t cause a player to have to go outside the game to find an answer. To know if your directions are clear, let somebody else read them. If they still can’t understand how to solve the puzzle, then the suggestions are either not straightforward or too complicated.
The Bottom-line
Creating a good puzzle on your website, or a mobile app, or as a board game — shouldn’t be a complicated task. By following these simple tips, you can design better puzzles to draw your players into the fictional world.
