Tsumiki Design Roundup — 2026-09-26

Introduction

Today's Tsumiki roundup. One piece today: a developer interview about Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure (review ↗), published by the puzzle-focused outlet Thinky Games.

Its theme is pouring the language of a puzzle game into the shell of an RPG. It ran in July 2024, right at launch, so it isn't new. But the question of how much of a genre's conventions to borrow, and where to drop them, is still useful to anyone making games.

Interview: How Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure uses the framework of an RPG to create a whimsical puzzle game

This is a feature by Matt Fuller for Thinky Games (English). The interviewees are Nick Suttner, writer and producer at developer Furniture & Mattress, and designer Nico Recabarren. Original ↗

First, the core system. As our review describes, when the heroine takes a step, everything sitting in the same row or column shifts with her, and the edges of the board wrap around to the other side.

According to Suttner, the aim was to build something "in the framework of and what feels like an RPG or an adventure game," but with "the vocabulary of a puzzle game." Recabarren described the iteration it took as being "like being a Roomba, and bumping into walls until you find the exit."

So what did they take from RPGs? Recabarren's answer: "I feel like it's mostly about the vibe of an RPG. More than actually, like, a strict set of rules." Visiting towns, talking to people, taking quests, following a hero's journey — the article explains that they kept that texture rather than strict RPG systems.

Items are the clearest example. "We have swords, and we have other mechanisms, but they don't exist in an inventory, they exist in the world," Suttner says. "There's no inventory, you just push things around."

Puzzle structure is concrete too. "Most of the puzzles are structured into sets based on a certain mechanic, so they don't get too deep and too complex for us to develop. We just show the novelty element of it," Suttner explains. That doesn't mean it's all easy: the article notes optional, more demanding challenges along the way.

The story ties in as well. "Once we figured out who the main character was and what she looked like, we made that a central element of the story. That was an important moment because everything grew from there," Suttner says. A heroine who can't help disturbing everything around her is woven into the story of Jemma, a girl searching for where she belongs.

Why it matters: Mixing RPGs and puzzles isn't unusual, but most such games add puzzles on top of combat and progression. This interview shows the opposite approach: treating the RPG as a bundle of vibes rather than a bundle of rules, and folding items, combat and movement into a single puzzle verb. It's a good prompt for thinking about what you bring along when you borrow a genre. (The "add on top vs. fold in" framing is my own reading of the article.)

Today's line

"What if a character couldn't help but move through the world and make a mess all the time?"

— Nick Suttner, in the Thinky Games interview. He goes on: "And that is probably like a lot of us in some way." The description of a mechanic doubles as a description of the heroine's personality, and I find that beautiful.

References

Today's piece:

・Interview: How Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure uses the framework of an RPG to create a whimsical puzzle game (Matt Fuller, Thinky Games, July 26, 2024, English)

A note on images: the environment this piece was written in couldn't reach the game-screenshot CDNs it normally uses, so no image could be visually verified before publishing. To avoid guessing at what an unseen image shows, this piece runs without one.

Closing

For someone like me who struggles with puzzles, the pleasure of wandering an RPG town is a walking stick that gets me through the stretches where I'm stuck. So I found myself nodding at the decision to borrow the vibe but not the rules. If I ever make a game, I'd like to try starting a mechanic from the heroine's quirk. Tomorrow I'll go looking for another design discussion somewhere in the world.