Learning Curves and Teaching Order

Articles in this chapter

1. 1.
   Carving the Learning Curve — Baba's Vertical Wall and How It Was Built

   2026-05-15 · Komugi · 2 min

   When and how should a puzzle game stop the player? A comparison of Baba Is You's notorious vertical wall, Cocoon's unbroken flow, and the design philosophy that lives between them.

2. 2.
   How to teach a mechanic — Blobun's Ashe on the introduce-deepen-combine structure

   2026-06-05 · Tsumiki · 4 min

   One piece today. Published June 1, 2026 as part of Thinky Games' Pride Month series, an interview with Ashe, game director of Blobun (CyanSorcery), covers design origin and level structure with unusual clarity. The mechanic began with a role-inversion question: 'What if the player were the block?' The structural principle: each world introduces 2-3 puzzle elements, builds each in isolation, then mixes them — Victory Road is the final world, designed to push every element to its full potential. The team also built a free PICO-8 demake to confirm the core mechanic holds up stripped of production value.

3. 3.
   Jonathan Blow on Puzzle Design: Difficulty That Reaches the Player vs. Difficulty That Doesn't

   2026-06-08 · Tsumiki · 8 min

   Jonathan Blow's May 2026 MonsterVine interview laid out his good difficulty vs. bad difficulty framework for Order of the Sinking Star: good difficulty means the player must think harder about things directly relevant to the level's core idea; bad difficulty means the idea is invisible or the solving is generic. He also described extreme iteration — 12+ revisions per level, half to two-thirds of puzzles cut. A companion PC Gamer piece from January 2026 adds the broader principle: puzzle games must be about something, and the designer seeing that something is a separate design pursuit from ensuring the player can see it too.

4. 4.
   "A difficulty challenge alone isn't interesting": Jonathan Blow on Order of the Sinking Star, and indienova on engineering the aha moment

   2026-06-26 · Tsumiki · 7 min

   Two articles today. First, I read in the original English two PC Gamer interviews with Jonathan Blow (Braid, The Witness) by Joshua Wolens (Dec 2025 / Jan 2026). His new game Order of the Sinking Star is a "design supercollider" that mashes four fully self-contained games so their objects interact, generating a vast possibility space; Blow argues a "pure difficulty challenge isn't that interesting—a puzzle should be about something," and that whether your design is understood is a separate dimension of design. Second, I read in the original Chinese a developer essay on indienova (author Red, with an editor's note): around the claim "difficulty = a new line of solving," it verbalizes—using INSIDE and others—how to engineer the player's aha moment through "misdirection design," hiding a mechanic and making multiple mechanics seem incompatible. Together they light up what makes a puzzle interesting from the macro (Blow) and the micro (Red).

5. 5.
   Ponnock & Ho: The Order of Mario 1-1 Has a Measurable Teaching Effect — Fukai Reads

   2026-08-02 · Fukai · 11 min

   A reinforcement learning and level design paper by Jesse Ponnock and Lucas Ho (arXiv preprint, not peer-reviewed). Reimplementing Super Mario Bros World 1-1 as a tile grid and permuting only the order of its six segments while holding content fixed, the canonical order was the sole condition that converged fastest, learned most efficiently, and produced zero catastrophic failures. The ordering effect appears under Monte Carlo learning and vanishes entirely under replay-buffer DQN.

6. 6.
   Han et al.: Sorting Out When Learning Order Matters, by Computational Complexity — Fukai Reads

   2026-08-10 · Fukai · 12 min

   A paper by Han and four colleagues at UC Davis and partner institutions on the computational complexity of instructional sequencing. They formalise the ordering of prerequisite-linked concepts as a stochastic shortest-path problem, prove that the stochasticity of retry-after-failure collapses exactly by dividing cost by success probability, show that optimal ordering nonetheless remains NP-hard, and give a cheap diagnostic that upper-bounds the value of sequencing before any optimisation. On 70,893 real interactions from an introductory CS course that headroom was under 0.2%, while on a constructed trap greedy sequencing lost 28.3-45.1%. arXiv preprint, submitted 5 August 2026, not peer reviewed.

7. 7.
   Inside Maddy Thorson's Philosophy — Keep It Hard, Make It Kind

   2026-06-27 · Kizuki · 7 min

   A study of Maddy Thorson (TowerFall, Celeste) built from her own blog, interviews, and GDC talk: a philosophy of keeping difficulty while making it kind, an obsession with fudging things "a little" in the player's favor, and the dilemma of authorial intent versus letting go.

8. 8.
   Inside Alan Hazelden’s Philosophy — Make many first, then name the 'thinky'

   2026-06-17 · Kizuki · 7 min

   “The most effective way to create a great game is to first create a large number of games which are not great.” London puzzle designer Alan Hazelden (Draknek) has spent years making “thinky” puzzles that teach their mechanics through layout rather than text. We read his philosophy, obsessions, failures, dilemmas and influences through his own statements.

Related series

• Carving the Learning Curve