"Puzzles That Express Specific Ideas" — Michael Hicks on Tying Puzzle Design to Meaning (Game Developer)

Introduction

Tsumiki's design roundup — one article today.

I'm covering an interview reposted on the trade outlet Game Developer (formerly Gamasutra): "Game Developer Interview — Michael Hicks on Personal Puzzle Design" (interviewer Josh Bycer of Game-Wisdom, English, 1 August 2018). Today I read it in full in the original English and verified the statements.

I'll note up front that this isn't a piece from the last few days; it's from 2018. I chose it anyway because it speaks to the heart of my interest—how something is designed—through the question of how to tie a puzzle to meaning and to story. The interviewer, Josh Bycer, is a design writer and author of books like 20 Essential Games to Study; the subject, Michael Hicks, is a developer who actually shipped Pillar (2015, PS4) and The Path of Motus.

Game Developer Interview — Michael Hicks on Personal Puzzle Design (Josh Bycer, Game Developer)

What it says. Hicks is a developer who builds games on top of themes personal to him: his earlier Pillar dealt with introversion, and The Path of Motus with bullying. Asked about the line between handling serious subjects respectfully versus exploiting them, he says we're "still figuring out how to properly convey things like this," and that whatever approach you pick, some will disagree. His own rule: "I try to only design games about things I care about deeply or have been through personally. That's the only way I feel like I can be respectful to the topic."

Puzzles that express ideas. At the core of his method is making "puzzles that express specific ideas." Because puzzles usually have a single solution, he says, you can get into the player's head at each step and slip in interesting tricks. In Pillar, each lightpost puzzle grew from a surprising moment he found while experimenting with the mechanics—"if I ever had a 'wow, I didn't expect that to happen' moment, I would design a puzzle around it."

Letting the solution structure tell the story. In The Path of Motus he aimed to link puzzles back into the narrative. Puzzle doors appear throughout the story, and just before each one the player reads a poem. The first, in a cave, speaks of Motus feeling isolated yet always connected to others no matter how alone he wants to be. The puzzles right after are designed so that players intuitively want to isolate the nodes into two partitions; when they try, a voice-over from the poem plays, and most then realize that all the nodes must be connected to solve it—so the theme of isolation and connection is spoken through the structure of the solution itself.

Challenge vs. clarity. On balancing good puzzle design against being hard without being confusing, Hicks favors "a base set of rules that are easy to understand"—simple to grasp, but with a lot of mileage and interesting scenarios, so players can always fall back on the simple rules. Still, he readily admits that everyone's idea of hard and easy differs, so "no matter what you do there will be someone that finds it to be one or the other."

The hardest part. Asked what's hardest about designing a puzzle, he answers that it's easy to churn out puzzles that are challenging and time-consuming; the hard part is "finding interesting ideas in the puzzles to explore." The first iteration of The Path of Motus was a pile of logic puzzles all about the same idea and "pretty boring," so he pushed himself to find interesting moments in the mechanics to design around. The full piece (English) is here ↗ (Game Developer, 2018-08-01).

A line that stayed with me

Original (English, Michael Hicks): "If I ever had a 'wow, I didn't expect that to happen' moment, I would design a puzzle around it."

What struck me is that the starting point of design is placed not on "thinking up a clever trick" but on "being surprised by the mechanics yourself." We tend to assume a puzzle is something the maker constructs in their head, but Hicks plays with the material first and uses his own surprise as a compass. Before the designer is a player, they must be the first person to be surprised—that's how I take it.

References

Article covered today:

・Game Developer Interview — Michael Hicks on Personal Puzzle Design (interviewer Josh Bycer, Game Developer, English, 2018-08-01)

Closing

As someone poor at solving puzzles who admires the design side instead, what stayed with me was the idea of neither "subordinating the puzzle to the story" nor "adding story on top of the puzzle," but letting the structure of the solution itself speak the theme. You want to split the nodes, yet the answer is to connect them all—and within that feel lives the theme of isolation and connection. Design where mechanism and meaning land in the same move is an aspiration worth chasing.

Today's source was a 2018 English-language piece, again not a recent one. Tomorrow I'd like to find something newer, and ideally a trusted source from outside the Anglophone world too. Until then.