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Any resources out there on making puzzles?

A topic by Dandyroot created Feb 03, 2026 Views: 259 Replies: 3
Viewing posts 1 to 3

Does anyone know of any good guides for making puzzles satisfyingly solveable, but not trivial or chaotic?


My game idea more or less revolves around a central moving-pieces-on-a-board puzzle mechanic, and I want to try and incorporate multiple possible solutions and gamestates. However, I don't want to incorporate too many, as I want to make art and dialogue to accompany the different solutions a player might find. If there's any info out there on how to manage the logic and flow of a puzzle, it would help a lot

Submitted(+1)

There are a few videos on puzzle design over on the Game Maker's Toolkit YouTube channel. He even did a devlog series on the development of his own puzzle game, which may help!

https://www.youtube.com/@GMTK

You don't need to watch every video if you don't want to. Not all of the videos are applicable to the puzzle design of puzzle games, but honestly I have been subscribed to them for as long as I can remember, and a lot of my understanding of game design came from them.

HostSubmitted(+2)

there are a few, but imo puzzle design is its own artform, and: It's Hard.  but like many artforms, one of the best ways to get a sense of it is to look at existing art that inspires you

for specifically managing the logic of a puzzle though...  i don't know exactly what you're looking for, but if you want like a state graph or something, that's usually gonna be done with bespoke tooling, because it would depend so heavily on your rules.  or you could wing it with regular ol flowchart software

(+1)

I think more than anything I'm wondering if there's already an existing philosophy out there on how to think about the logic at all. Just having the language for "oh this is a loose-ends style choice labyrinth"(for e.g) would be a good jumping off point for sorting my thoughts.

That said I hope to make do either way!