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Inside Alan Hazelden’s Philosophy — Make many first, then name the 'thinky'
“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.
Closing Into One Screen — The Density a One-Screen Puzzle Builds
Sokoban, Baba Is You, Snakebird, Patrick's Parabox — the strongest thinking puzzles keep their whole board on one screen. A designer's look at why simultaneous visibility deepens thought, and when breaking the frame is worth its cost.
No prizes, clear constraints, real community — the design wisdom behind Thinky Puzzle Game Jam 6
One article today. We cover Corey Hardt’s May 15 announcement of the 6th annual Thinky Puzzle Game Jam (running June 20–28). The jam’s deliberate “no prizes” policy, 48-hour working limit, and PuzzleScript-friendly approach distinguish it from commercially-oriented jams, creating a space for pure design experimentation. Over 150 participants have already joined.
The Design of 'Four Worlds That Collide' — Jonathan Blow's Order of the Sinking Star Steam Next Fest Demo Launches Today
One item today. Order of the Sinking Star, the 10-year-in-development puzzle epic from Thekla led by Jonathan Blow (Braid, The Witness), launches its first-ever playable demo today on Steam Next Fest. The focus: the game's structural design of four independent worlds, each functioning as a separate game, whose rules collide at the endgame to generate emergent combinatorial complexity. Based on GamesBeat's hands-on report by Dean Takahashi (June 10, 2026).
The Grammar of Zachtronics — Translating Programming into Puzzle
SpaceChem, TIS-100, Shenzhen I/O, Opus Magnum, Exapunks. A maker's-eye reading of the programming-puzzle grammar Zach Barth honed from 2011 to 2022, along three axes: the command queue as a verb, optimization design that abandons the single solution, and the ladder of abstraction.
Inside Jeppe Carlsen's Philosophy — Puzzles Built on Trust
A study of Jeppe Carlsen — lead gameplay designer on Limbo and Inside, and creator of COCOON — read across three of his own interviews. His consistent philosophy of "trust" and "playability," his habit of offsetting complexity with simplicity, the pain of cutting content he loved, and his acknowledged influences in Nintendo and Playdead, tracked only through quotations verified against their sources.
Puzzle-in-Combat Design and the Question Randomness Poses to Puzzle Design
Two pieces today. How Capcom's Pragmata integrates real-time Snake-style puzzles into third-person combat — and the design challenge of avoiding repetition (Game Developer, Alessandro Fillari, April 14, 2026). Then Mark Brown (GMTK) on the fundamental tension between randomness and puzzle design in Blue Prince: what happens when you have clue A but the house won't give you room B (GMTK Substack, May 8, 2025).
Narrative Puzzles and Storyless Puzzles — Lorelei vs Stephen's Sausage Roll
The pure maneuvers of Stephen's Sausage Roll versus Lorelei and the Laser Eyes' solutions fused with story. What narrative and storyless puzzles each sell, contrasted from a designer's view across Obra Dinn, Golden Idol, COCOON, and Machinarium.
Ten years of sausage grilling and a shift of perspective — minimal rules, maximal depth, and spatial cognition as puzzle material
Two articles today. First: Thinky Games' 10th anniversary feature on Stephen's Sausage Roll (April 21, 2026) — the sokoban-like praised by puzzle developers as perfectly designed, which birthed the sausage-like subgenre through radical minimalism. Second: Alan Hazelden's Thinky Third Thursday April 2026 (April 16), spotlighting A Little Perspective and He Who Watches — two games that use perspective shifts and spatial cognition as their core puzzle material.
Jonathan Blow on Puzzle Design: Difficulty That Reaches the Player vs. Difficulty That Doesn't
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.
Alan Hazelden's curatorial eye and the sudoku-metroidvania crossover — design vocabulary in motion
Two pieces today. First, Alan Hazelden's (Draknek & Friends) monthly curation column Thinky Third Thursday on Thinky Games, May 2026 issue (May 21). Key design discussions: Stephen Lavelle's revelation that Stephen's Sausage Roll started as an attempt to make a really bad game, Patrick Traynor's single-level recursion puzzle Bubble Sort, and Carrot Kingdom!'s design of mechanics the player had all along. Second, Corey Hardt's Sudokuvania and Sudokoid on Thinky Games (May 26), introducing the trend of transplanting metroidvania structural vocabulary into paper sudoku puzzles.
How to teach a mechanic — Blobun's Ashe on the introduce-deepen-combine structure
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.
Puzzles that live inside the world — Tonda Ros on eight years of design: "no intended solution" and the melancholy Myst left behind
Two pieces today, both examining the design philosophy of Blue Prince (Dogubomb, Tonda Ros), the puzzle game that dominated 2025 and won Best Design at the 2026 GDC Awards and DICE Awards. First: a Game Developer interview (Bryant Francis, March 4, 2026) in which Ros explains how Myst's environmental storytelling of a past just out of reach shaped Blue Prince's somber tone, and how a single letter from Herbert Sinclair in the Tomb transforms the game from puzzle-toy to something heartbreaking. Second: a Thinky Games interview (Dayten Rose, April 10, 2025, launch day) in which Ros traces the game's dual origins in tabletop mechanics and Myst-inspired first-person design, and explains his core design belief: "intended solution" is a dirty word at Dogubomb. Put together, both pieces converge on the same idea — a puzzle needs to live inside its world.
How to make 'just-right' difficulty — letting a machine fit it to the player (a Canadian study) vs. a human authoring it through meaning (a US developer)
A version rebuilt with credible sources only. Two pieces today, both answering 'how do you deliver just-right difficulty?' from opposite directions. The first is a research paper by Canadian researchers Matthew McConnell and Richard Zhao (September 2025, arXiv): a system that generates puzzles in real time with a genetic algorithm and auto-tunes difficulty per player, validated in a user study. Its key finding: using 'time-on-task' alone as the adaptivity metric fails. The second is an interview with game designer Michael Hicks (Game Developer): churning out hard, time-consuming puzzles is easy; the truly hard part is finding interesting ideas to explore. A machine fitting difficulty to the player, and a human authoring difficulty through meaning. Both sources are peer-reviewed research and professional media - the kind makers can cite with confidence.
Soundtrack: Patrick's Parabox — the sound unspooling as the boxes multiply
The music Priscilla Snow wrote for the recursive sokoban Patrick's Parabox sits exactly between electronic and ambient: a calm, inquisitive accompaniment. The timbre updates each time a new mechanic appears, and the track titles are literally the names of those mechanics. Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take apart why this sound never gets in the way of long thinking, through a lens you can carry home to your own composing.
Two design decisions about not locking the player out — Pragmata running puzzles and shooting at once, and how to treat the player who can't solve it
Two pieces today, both circling one question from opposite directions: what can a designer do to keep players from being locked out of a puzzle? First, a Game Developer interview (April 14, 2026) in which Capcom's developers explain how Pragmata, a rare 'puzzle shooter' that stacks a real-time Snake-style hacking puzzle on top of third-person combat, was designed so as not to feel repetitive. Second, game designer Cheryl-Jean Leo's 2017 essay 'Are You Creating Impossible Puzzles?', which starts from the premise that no matter how carefully you design, you will eventually make a puzzle that is impossible for someone, and argues for giving away answers inside the game. A live development floor and a nine-year-old critique - placed side by side, the core of difficulty design comes faintly into view.
This weekend's Cerebral Puzzle Showcase, and designing the act of 'taking notes' into the puzzle itself
Two pieces today. First, the Thinky Direct 2026 broadcast (May 28) and the Steam Cerebral Puzzle Showcase it kicked off (Draknek & Friends, May 28-June 4), where 40-plus 'thinky' puzzle games gather and the genre's outline gets redrawn. Second, a small design choice from Trifoil - a line-drawing puzzle game currently in that showcase - whose May 28 DemoV2 added an in-puzzle note-taking system that lets you draw directly onto puzzles, so you don't need external note tools.
Designing the player's cognitive load — a two-layer combat-puzzle structure, and tuning the difficulty curve
Two highlights today. Game Developer's interview with the team behind Capcom's Pragmata explains how they made a 'two-layer' design work, stacking a real-time Snake-style hacking puzzle on top of third-person combat. The second is PurpleSloth's devlog on difficulty design, recounting how lessons from their previous game Chronescher fed into their next title TRAILS. Both answer the same question — how to manage the player's cognitive load — from opposite directions.
Amanita Design's cardboard craftsmanship and the puzzle game industry's largest showcase
Two highlights today: Amanita Design's Phonopolis, a 10-year handcrafted cardboard adventure released May 20; and Thinky Direct 2026 on May 28, which showcased 40+ puzzle games and launched the Cerebral Puzzle Showcase on Steam.