FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION
Scott Kim’s Eight Steps
Scott Kim is a designer who creates puzzles for print media, web sites, and computer games. At the 1999 Game Developer's Conference he gave a lecture entitled "The Art of Puzzle Game Design," in which he identified eight steps in puzzle game design (Kim, 1999). The first four steps comprise the process of specifying the rules, while the last four comprise the process of building the puzzles and the game itself:
1. Find inspiration. This can come from a variety of sources, including other games. Tetris, for example, was inspired by a noncomputer game called Pentominoes. You can be inspired by a piece of art (the drawings of M. C. Escher have a very puzzlelike feel), a story, or some particular subject matter. Another source of inspiration is a play dynamic of some kind: flipping switches, turning knobs, sliding objects around, or picking them up and putting them down. Or there are more complex dynamics among objects: balance, reflection, connection, and transmission.
2. Simplify. Suppose you have an idea for a puzzle: efficiently parking vehicles of different sizes in a crowded parking lot so that when someone asks you to retrieve his car, you have to move as few other cars as possible. Part of making this task fun is simplifying it to its essentials. First, identify the essential tricky core skill (in this case, space planning on the fly) and concentrate on that. Second, eliminate any irrelevant details. Don't make your player worry about crashing the cars, for example. Third, make the pieces uniform. Instead of having cars with infinitely variable shapes and sizes, it's better to have several standard types that conform to a square grid. Finally, simplify the controls. Figure out what the essential moves are and devise controls that implement them with a minimum of fiddling.
3. Create a construction set. The only way to be sure that a puzzle concept works is to play it, but obviously you don't want to code up the whole game before you know whether it's fun. You can build a paper prototype or a simple version in something like Macromedia Flash to see if it works. The rule designer can play with the prototype to tweak the rules, and later the level designer can use it to build levels. You can also code a construction set into the final game so that players can build puzzles for each other.
4. Define the rules. This is the key part of puzzle design. Most puzzles are characterized in terms of four things: the board (Is it a grid? A network? Is it irregular? Or is there no board at all?), the pieces (How are they shaped? What pictures are on them? What other attributes do they have? Where do they come from?), the moves (What is allowed and what is not? Are they sequential or simultaneous? What side effects do they have?), and the goal or victory condition (Does it have to be an exact match, or will a partial one do?).
5. Construct the puzzles. A puzzle challenges the player to get from a problem to a solution, but of course, the path isn't simple. Every puzzle requires that the player make choices, some of which lead to dead ends. In an adventure game, each puzzle appears in a larger context (the story) that gives it meaning, and solving it advances the plot somehow. Some puzzle games also offer an overall plot of sorts or won't let you try the next puzzle until you've completed the current one. Good puzzles require insight from the player, the "Aha!" moment that occurs when the player realizes how the puzzle works and how to solve it. But you mustn't require an insight that's too obscure, or it will feel unfair. If you tell the player that he's in a maze, it's unfair for the only solution to be to knock down the walls unless you indicate somehow that this is possible.
6. Test. Testing tells you several things. It tells you whether the puzzle is too easy or too hard (this can be difficult to predict in advance), and it also tells you whether it's fun in the first place. It helps you find out if there are alternative solutions that you didn't think of, and it helps you discover errors in the rules. And, of course, it lets people try out the user interface. Because puzzle actions tend to be repetitive, it's important that the interface be smooth and not frustrating.
7. Devise a sequence. Now it's time to order all your puzzles into a sequence. The most obvious arrangement is a linear or accelerating sequence going from easy to difficult, but in practice, that becomes tiring and discouraging. A better arrangement is a sawtooth shape, which gets difficult for a while, then goes back to an easy puzzle, and so on, over and over. And, of course, you can give the player the freedom to play the puzzles out of order or let her earn that right. You also need to think about transitions between puzzles, something that will keep her moving on to the next one. War games and role-playing games often do this with a storyline. Or, the player can be working on a metapuzzle (a single large puzzle, parts of which the player solves in between the regular puzzles), which motivates her to complete the whole game.
8. Pay attention to presentation. Finally, of course, there are all the other details of game design: sound, graphical style, animation, user interface elements, storyline (if any), and so on. If you're used to designing other kinds of games, it might be tempting to move this to an earlier point in the process, but with puzzle games, the puzzles are 90 percent of the battle. Get them right first, and the rest won't be nearly as hard.
