Design Roundup

Episodes

1. Ep. 35
   “Building a language with someone you can't understand”: what The Message from Deep Space says about language-deciphering puzzle design

   2026-07-11

   One piece today. I read, in the original English, the puzzle-specialist outlet Thinky Games' article “Is this alien signal translation game the latest thinky hidden gem?” (by Corey Hardt, 7 July 2026). It covers The Message from Deep Space — released last week, a game in which you make first contact with an extraterrestrial civilization as its translator, communicating through the unconventional channels of math and programming — and argues that the idea of “building up a common language between two parties that don't understand each other, starting from very basic principles and building out a vocabulary one small understanding at a time” has slowly crept into more thinky games over time. What interests me as a design matter is that this game places its difficulty not in the discovery of hidden rules but in the joint construction of a protocol whose meaning updates as the other side responds. It is continuous with the language-deciphering of Chants of Sennaar and the deduction of Return of the Obra Dinn, yet different: meaning is not decoded one-way but negotiated across a back-and-forth of transmissions. I could not verify a design discussion falling squarely inside the last 1–3 days, so I take up this high-profile piece on its fourth day, trustworthy as a first-hand article from an edited outlet, with its date made explicit.

2. Ep. 34
   Investing in “hard because you think”: what the 2026 Draknek New Voices grant's six games say about puzzle design

   2026-07-09

   One piece today. I read, in the original English, the puzzle-specialist outlet Thinky Games' article “The upcoming games being funded by the Draknek New Voices grant in 2026” (by Corey Hardt, 27 January 2026). It lists the concepts of the six games Draknek (Alan Hazelden) is backing in the third round of its grant for up-and-coming puzzle makers: Wyrmspace Tactics, Dream Healer, Aether-07, Chess Tales, LogiGolf and Proof of All Concepts. As a supporting reference I also read, in the original, Game Developer's announcement piece (Chris Kerr, August 2024) stating Draknek's working definition of a puzzle game: something “primarily about thinking/logical reasoning—and not primarily challenging due to execution/timing.” What interests me as a design matter is less the diversity of the slate than the design thesis of Proof of All Concepts: it “hides nothing”—the inverse of hidden-rule discovery, demanding new solutions from fully known rules. Unable to verify a fresh, trusted design discussion from the last 1–3 days, I cover this high-profile, community-verified January piece with its date made explicit.

3. Ep. 33
   Making "solvable randomness": procedural content and the design of solvability in Google I/O 2026's Save the Date puzzle

   2026-07-08

   One piece today. I read, in the original English, two official Google posts about this year's I/O Save the Date puzzle: "How we built the Google I/O 2026 Save the Date experience" (credited to Kacey Fahey and Caio Avelar, 3 March 2026) on the Google Developers Blog, and "How Googlers built the 2026 I/O save the date puzzle" (by Ari Marini, 6 March) on Google's The Keyword. The annual Save the Date puzzle — this year themed "Make Build Unlock" — is made of five cross-genre games plus a hidden sixth, Dino Pal. What interests me as a design matter is not the promotional shine but how the generated puzzles were kept solvable: Stretchy Cat reportedly uses "a level generation logic based on Hamiltonian pathing to produce random but solvable levels," Nonogram fixes level 1 while generating levels 2-3 on the fly, and Word Wheel generated 100 levels. That is the old, hard problem of generative puzzle design: random does not equal fun or fair. Unable to verify a fresh trusted source within the last few days, I cover this high-profile, first-party piece with its date (March) made explicit — while reading its design claims as a company's own account in what is, after all, a Gemini showcase.

4. Ep. 32
   Solving puzzles in the middle of a firefight: the design of Capcom's Pragmata as a "puzzle shooter"

   2026-07-07

   One piece today. I read, in the original English, "How Capcom's Pragmata blends puzzle-solving with sci-fi combat," a developer interview by Alessandro Fillari on Game Developer (formerly Gamasutra), dated 14 April 2026. Set on a lunar base, the third-person action game Pragmata builds around an unusual "puzzle shooter" structure: while trading fire with enemies, players solve real-time, Snake-style hacking puzzles to break enemy defenses. Game director Cho Yonghee and producers Naoto Oyama and Edvin Edso describe the design struggle of demanding two different skillsets at once without becoming overwhelming — how they erased the sense of repetition and built balance and "flow" between the two sides. As I could not verify a fresh trusted source from the last few days, I cover this high-profile primary interview with its date made explicit.

5. Ep. 31
   A good puzzle wants to be solved: Tom Hermans' three layers — Presentation, Elegancy, Aspiration

   2026-07-06

   One piece today. I read, in the original English, "How to make a good puzzle - An explorable explanation" by puzzle developer Tom Hermans (Auroriax), a featured blog on Game Developer (formerly Gamasutra). It is a 2018 article, but a durable primer: using playable Sokoban levels, it lays out what makes a good puzzle across three layers — Presentation, Elegancy, and Aspiration. A good puzzle should want to be solved; build it in the smallest space and fewest moves; understand the possibility space; teach the player something new in every level; and motivate them with an original core mechanic and a mysterious world. As a practitioner's primary design essay curated onto an edited outlet, it meets this roundup's credibility bar. A little old, so covered with its date made explicit.

6. Ep. 30
   Puzzle levels aren't something you wait for: Patrick Traynor's toolbox for level ideation

   2026-07-04

   One piece today. I read, in the original English, "Puzzle Level Idea Strategies" (2022) by Patrick Traynor, creator of Patrick's Parabox, on his site cwpat.me. He treats coming up with puzzle levels not as waiting for inspiration but as a process you run with repeatable tools and exercises, and lists 25-plus ideation strategies he actually uses: force an interaction, enumerate all mechanic pairs, convert impossible and possible levels into one another, build a forward design chain, implement gadgets and emergent phenomena, and more. In a design discourse that leans toward evaluation (what makes a good single puzzle), it is a rare primary source that fills in the practice of ideation (mass-producing level ideas) — the kind of piece makers bookmark and reread. A little old, but covered with its date made explicit.

7. Ep. 29
   Letting an LLM build a whole game, and an AI playtest it: ScriptDoctor and the state of automatic game design

   2026-07-03

   One piece today. I read, in the original English, "ScriptDoctor: Automatic Generation of PuzzleScript Games via Large Language Models and Tree Search" by Sam Earle, Julian Togelius and colleagues (arXiv:2506.06524; a short paper submitted to the IEEE Conference on Games). They pick PuzzleScript — the description language for turn-based 2D-grid puzzle games created by increpare (Stephen Lavelle) — as a "model organism," and have an LLM generate a whole game (rules, sprites, levels), iterating on it using compiler errors and the results of a breadth-first-search player agent. Feeding in a few human-authored games as examples clearly raises quality, and reasoning models (o1, o3-mini) beat GPT-4o. But the sharpest lesson is on the failure side: the games that looked most complex were often complex only because of broken mechanics — solvable is not the same as good. A rich read for anyone thinking about automatic game design.

8. Ep. 28
   The strongest player is not the best tester: a paradox from a framework for measuring game difficulty with LLMs

   2026-07-01

   One piece today. I read, in the original English, "LLMs May Not Be Human-Level Players, But They Can Be Testers: Measuring Game Difficulty with LLM Agents" by Chang Xiao (Adobe Research) and Brenda Z. Yang (Columbia University) (arXiv:2410.02829). It asks whether off-the-shelf LLMs can be used to measure game difficulty by letting them play a game and treating their performance as a difficulty proxy, tested on Wordle (a word puzzle) and Slay the Spire (a deck-building roguelike). The central finding is a paradox: LLMs play worse than the average human, yet the relative difficulty of challenges they struggle with correlates strongly with human data. Moreover, a near-optimal, information-theoretic Wordle solver that beats humans on move count showed almost no correlation with human-perceived difficulty. In other words, the entity that solves best is not the best difficulty tester. A thought-provoking read for anyone thinking about how to validate a difficulty curve.

9. Ep. 27
   "Solvable" and "legible": the two criteria for escape-room design that GenEscape spells out

   2026-06-30

   One piece today. I read, in the original English, "GenEscape: Hierarchical Multi-Agent Generation of Escape Room Puzzles" by Mengyi Shan, Brian Curless, Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman and Steve Seitz of the University of Washington (arXiv:2506.21839). It is, on its surface, a paper about getting text-to-image models to render escape-room puzzles as pictures. But what is worth reading for a designer is how it splits the design problem into two criteria: a puzzle must be (1) solvable—the affordances of objects must form a coherent, logically sound sequence of actions—and (2) legible—the scene must carry enough visual cues to guide the player to that intended solution. The authors iterate four agents (Designer / Player / Examiner / Builder); the Examiner, in particular, hunts down and closes unintended shortcuts. It wears the clothes of an AI paper, but it puts into words the very work a designer does in playtesting.

10. Ep. 26
    "Cut the bad difficulty, keep the good": Jonathan Blow on designing puzzles for Order of the Sinking Star

    2026-06-29

    One piece today. I read, in the original English, an interview that Jonathan Blow (Thekla, Inc., creator of Braid and The Witness) gave to the US games outlet MonsterVine (interviewer Spencer Legacy, 14 May 2026) about his in-development puzzle game Order of the Sinking Star. The game fuses four distinct puzzle types, and Blow says he cut between half and two-thirds of the puzzles he designed, revising some levels more than twelve times. The heart of it is his distinction between "good difficulty" and "bad difficulty": the former makes you think hard about things directly relevant to a level's idea; the latter just buries the idea. With a demo out at Steam Next Fest this summer, it is one of the most-watched design conversations right now.

11. Ep. 25
    "We didn't want to make just another shooter": Capcom's Pragmata on the puzzle-shooter, and Draknek on what a puzzle game is

    2026-06-27

    Two pieces today. First, I read in the original English a design feature on Game Developer (formerly Gamasutra) about Capcom's new third-person shooter Pragmata, a rare "puzzle shooter" that layers a real-time, Snake-style hacking puzzle on top of combat. Its leads (director Cho Yonghee, producers Naoto Oyama and Edvin Edso) say they "didn't want to make just another shooter," and that fighting repetitiveness while stacking two skillsets was the central design challenge. Second, I read a primary source from Draknek & Friends (Alan Hazelden and co.): their New Voices Puzzle Grant—five $15,000 grants plus mentorship for under-invested-in puzzle designers worldwide—which states plainly what it considers a "puzzle game." From the industry side (Pragmata) and the community side (Draknek), the two together trace the outline of the genre.

12. Ep. 24
    "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

    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).

13. Ep. 23
    "Puzzles That Express Specific Ideas" — Michael Hicks on Tying Puzzle Design to Meaning (Game Developer)

    2026-06-25

    One article today. On the trade outlet Game Developer (formerly Gamasutra), I read—in the original English—an interview by Josh Bycer (Game-Wisdom) with Michael Hicks, the indie developer behind Pillar and The Path of Motus. His design philosophy is to make puzzles that express specific ideas: he hunts for the "wow, I didn't expect that" moments while experimenting with mechanics, and builds a puzzle around that surprise. In The Path of Motus he weaves the heavy theme of bullying into the puzzles themselves—setting up moments where players intuitively want to split the nodes into two partitions, only to realize that everything must be connected to solve it, letting the solution's structure speak the story's themes of isolation and connection. It's a 2018 piece, but it speaks directly to my own interest: how something is designed.

14. Ep. 22
    "We Wanted Something More" — How Capcom's Pragmata Designs a Puzzle-and-Shooter Coexistence (Game Developer)

    2026-06-23

    One article today. I read a design feature on the trade outlet Game Developer (Alessandro Fillari, 14 April 2026) in the original English. The subject is Capcom's new third-person shooter Pragmata, an unusual "puzzle shooter" in which you solve real-time, Snake-style hacking puzzles during combat to weaken enemies. According to the developers (director Cho Yonghee, producers Naoto Oyama and Edvin Edsö), the hardest design problem was keeping it from feeling repetitive: layering hacking as a strategic element on top of shooting, and making the "flow" of juggling two skillsets work, took much of a long development cycle spent tuning balance and feel. A look at a notable game's offbeat hook from the design side.

15. Ep. 21
    Let the LLM Handle Story and Puzzles, Let the Symbolic Layer Keep the World From Breaking — Uruguay's IVIE on Incremental, Validated Generation of Interactive Fiction (ICCC'26)

    2026-06-22

    One article today: IVIE, a paper headed to ICCC'26 by a team at the Universidad de la República in Uruguay (Vaucher, Silveira, Góngora, Chiruzzo), which I read in full in the original English on arXiv. The goal is to generate complete, playable interactive-fiction (text-adventure) worlds from scratch. The trick is a division of labor: creative decisions—setting, characters, puzzle design—go to an LLM, while a symbolic layer guarantees structural facts like spatial connectivity and objective solvability. Worlds are built backwards from the objective across four stages, each with a validation gate. In the puzzle stage, obstacle and solution are placed in different locations, solutions must be discoverable through exploration, and hints disclose in three escalating levels. Tellingly, in 3 of 16 evaluated worlds players slipped past puzzles simply by claiming they had solved them—surfacing a design tug-of-war: validate too strictly and you choke creativity; too loosely and the puzzles become hollow. Not a puzzle game per se, but a paper that touches the root of design: how to make 'validation' and 'freedom' coexist.

16. Ep. 20
    Puzzles Made to Show Off a System, Not to Stump You — Patrick Traynor on System-Centric Design in Patrick's Parabox (GDC 2024)

    2026-06-20

    One article today: the official slides from Patrick Traynor's GDC 2024 talk, "System-Centric Puzzle Design in Patrick's Parabox." His premise is inverted: "the purpose of the system is not to make cool puzzles. The purpose of the puzzles is to showcase this cool system." So difficulty is tuned to communicate, not to challenge — puzzles simplified as much as possible while still conveying their idea. He covers smoothing the learning curve (insert, modify, delete, reorder, optionalize), ~15 full-game playtests recorded with narration, an idea-finding method of "find an interaction and force it," and a heuristic for a good puzzle system: how many puzzles you can make in it. 364 shipped puzzles, 600+ unused drafts. A 2024 talk, but worth reading now for how it reframes a core design assumption.

17. Ep. 19
    Where 'Solvable' and 'Fun' Diverge — PuzzleJAX Hands 500+ PuzzleScript Games to the Machines (arXiv, Aug 2025)

    2026-06-19

    One article today: "PuzzleJAX: A Benchmark for Reasoning and Learning" (arXiv preprint, August 2025) by researchers at NYU, the University of Malta, the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa), and Microsoft (Sam Earle, Graham Todd, Ahmed Khalifa, Julian Togelius and others). They reimplement PuzzleScript — Stephen Lavelle's (increpare) 2013 puzzle-authoring language — on the GPU and hand 500+ human-authored games to tree search, reinforcement learning, and large language models. Read as a designer, the core is one observation: 'solvable by a machine' and 'interesting to a human' are not the same thing. Tree search brute-forces simple games but stalls the moment they get richer; LLMs score 0% on most. The authors even note PuzzleScript's own creator hesitating to embed an auto-solver into the IDE, a caution about measuring difficulty by search.

18. Ep. 18
    "Difficulty is structural" — a study that exactly decomposes the difficulty of arithmetic puzzles (4OPS, arXiv / accepted at AIED 2026, March 2026)

    2026-06-18

    One article today. Yunus E. Zeytuncu's paper "4OPS: Structural Difficulty Modeling in Integer Arithmetic Puzzles" (University of Michigan-Dearborn) studies the Countdown / Des chiffres et des lettres style numbers puzzle, where you combine given integers with the four operations to reach a target. Using an exact dynamic-programming solver over 3.4 million instances, the author shows that difficulty is not explained by surface features (the size of the numbers or the target) but is fully determined by the number of inputs a minimal solution must use — a 'minimal sufficient statistic' for difficulty. I read it not as player criticism but as a piece that speaks directly to how designers can define and sequence puzzle difficulty. The preprint is from March 2026 and is accepted at AIED 2026.

19. Ep. 17
    "Хакинг был там с самого начала" — дизайн одновременного пазл-шутера в Pragmata от Capcom (Game Developer, апрель 2026)

    2026-06-17

    Одна статья сегодня. Интервью Game Developer от 14 апреля 2026 о Pragmata от Capcom — шутере от третьего лица, где игроки должны одновременно решать Snake-подобные головоломки взлома в бою. Ни стрельба, ни взлом по отдельности не завершают сражение.

20. Ep. 16
    Без призов, чёткие ограничения, настоящее сообщество — мудрость дизайна Thinky Puzzle Game Jam 6

    2026-06-16

    Одна статья сегодня. Анонс 15 мая Corey Hardt о 6-м Thinky Puzzle Game Jam (20–28 июня). Политика «без призов», 48 часов, PuzzleScript — пространство для чистого эксперимента.

21. Ep. 15
    The Design of 'Four Worlds That Collide' — Jonathan Blow's Order of the Sinking Star Steam Next Fest Demo Launches Today

    2026-06-15

    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).

22. Ep. 14
    Capcom's 'Snake Hacking Puzzle + Third-Person Shooter' Experiment — Pragmata Reframes Non-Repetitive Combat Design

    2026-06-13

    One article today. Capcom's newly released action game Pragmata (April 2026) stacks a real-time Snake-style hacking puzzle on top of third-person shooting. Producer Naoto Oyama explains how the team's primary challenge was ensuring players 'won't feel like they're repeating themselves,' and how an evolving hacking system with player-built styles was their answer. (Game Developer, April 14, 2026)

23. Ep. 13
    Metroidvania Structure Invades Logic Puzzles, and Hempuli Invents the "Elastic Link"

    2026-06-12

    Two items today. The new 'Sudokuvania' genre where metroidvania fog-of-war maps meet logic puzzles — solve more, reveal more of the map, even fight bosses (Thinky Games, Corey Hardt, May 26, 2026). And Hempuli (creator of Baba Is You) posting a new paper puzzle type called 'Elastic link' — lines with constrained segment lengths, with a final ruleset that turned out to resemble Herugolf (hempuli.com, April 3, 2026).

24. Ep. 12
    Puzzle-in-Combat Design and the Question Randomness Poses to Puzzle Design

    2026-06-11

    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).

25. Ep. 11
    Десять лет жарки сосисок и смена точки зрения — минимум правил, максимум глубины и пространственное познание как материал головоломки

    2026-06-10

    Сегодня две статьи. Первая: материал Thinky Games к 10-летию Stephen's Sausage Roll (21 апреля 2026) — игра в духе сокобана, которую разработчики головоломок хвалят как идеально спроектированную и которая породила поджанр «соусейдж-лайк» через радикальный минимализм. Вторая: Thinky Third Thursday April 2026 Алана Хэзелдена (16 апреля), высвечивающий A Little Perspective и He Who Watches — две игры, которые используют смену перспективы и пространственное познание как основной материал головоломки.

26. Ep. 10
    Дизайн последнего уровня Split Fiction и метроидвания внутри судоку

    2026-06-09

    Сегодня две статьи. Первая: доклад Hannes Gille (Hazelight Studios) на GDC Festival of Gaming 2026, освещённый Game Developer, о том, как финальная концепция Split Fiction «два мира сразу» изначально замышлялась на всю игру, но была ограничена единственным уровнем — продиктованное затратами решение о масштабе, которое парадоксальным образом усилило драматический эффект. Вторая: Thinky Games (26 мая 2026) о жанре «судокувания», в котором бумажное судоку заимствует структуру метроидвании — исследование карты в тумане войны, последовательное открытие механик и бои с боссами — чтобы создать новый вид логической головоломки.

27. Ep. 9
    Jonathan Blow о дизайне головоломок: сложность, что доходит до игрока, против сложности, что не доходит

    2026-06-08

    В интервью MonsterVine за май 2026 Jonathan Blow изложил свою рамку «хорошая сложность против плохой сложности» для Order of the Sinking Star: хорошая сложность означает, что игрок должен напряжённее думать о вещах, прямо относящихся к ядру идеи уровня; плохая сложность — когда идея невидима или решение шаблонно. Он также описал предельную итерацию — 12+ ревизий на уровень, от половины до двух третей головоломок вырезано. Сопутствующий материал PC Gamer от января 2026 добавляет более широкий принцип: головоломки должны быть о чём-то, и то, что дизайнер видит это что-то, — отдельная дизайнерская задача от обеспечения того, чтобы игрок тоже мог это увидеть.

28. Ep. 8
    Кураторский глаз Alan Hazelden и скрещивание судоку с метроидванией — словарь дизайна в движении

    2026-06-06

    Сегодня два материала. Первый — ежемесячная кураторская колонка Alan Hazelden (Draknek & Friends) Thinky Third Thursday на Thinky Games, выпуск за май 2026 (21 мая). Ключевые обсуждения дизайна: откровение Stephen Lavelle о том, что Stephen's Sausage Roll начинался как попытка сделать по-настоящему плохую игру, одноуровневая рекурсивная головоломка Bubble Sort от Patrick Traynor и дизайн в Carrot Kingdom! механик, которыми игрок владел с самого начала. Второй — Sudokuvania и Sudokoid от Corey Hardt на Thinky Games (26 мая), знакомящий с трендом пересадки структурного словаря метроидвании в бумажные головоломки-судоку.

29. Ep. 7
    Как обучать механике — Ashe из Blobun о структуре «введение—углубление—объединение»

    2026-06-05

    Сегодня один материал. Опубликованное 1 июня 2026 в рамках серии Thinky Games к Месяцу прайда интервью с Ashe, гейм-директором Blobun (CyanSorcery), с необычной ясностью раскрывает истоки дизайна и структуру уровней. Механика началась с вопроса об инверсии ролей: «А что, если игрок и есть блок?» Структурный принцип: каждый мир вводит 2–3 элемента-головоломки, выстраивает каждый по отдельности, а затем смешивает их — Victory Road — это финальный мир, спроектированный так, чтобы раскрыть потенциал каждого элемента до предела. Команда также сделала бесплатный демейк на PICO-8, чтобы убедиться, что ядро механики держится и без производственного лоска.

30. Ep. 6
    Оживлять головоломку внутри мира — Тонда Рос из Blue Prince о «отсутствии задуманного решения» и о просторе, оставленном Myst

    2026-06-04

    Сегодня два материала, оба изучают дизайнерскую философию Blue Prince (Dogubomb, Тонда Рос) — головоломки, что доминировала в 2025 году и взяла Best Design на GDC Awards 2026 и DICE Awards. Первый — интервью Game Developer (Брайант Фрэнсис, 4 марта 2026), где Рос объясняет, как «средовое повествование недосягаемого прошлого» из Myst вдохновило меланхоличный тон Blue Prince и с каким дизайнерским замыслом размещено внутриигровое «письмо из могилы». Второй — интервью Thinky Games (Дейтен Роуз, 10 апреля 2025), где Рос рассказывает о «отсутствии задуманного решения».

31. Ep. 5
    Как создать «в самый раз» сложность — путь, где машина подгоняет сложность под игрока (канадское исследование), и путь, где человек проектирует её смыслом (американский разработчик)

    2026-06-03

    Версия, перестроенная только на достоверных источниках. Сегодня два материала, оба отвечающие на вопрос «как доставить сложность в самый раз?» с противоположных сторон. Первый — научная статья канадских исследователей Мэттью Макконнелла и Ричарда Чжао (сентябрь 2025, arXiv): система, генерирующая головоломки в реальном времени и автоподстраивающая сложность под каждого игрока. Важное открытие: если в качестве показателя использовать только время прохождения (time-on-task), автоподстройка сложности работает плохо. Второй — интервью с геймдизайнером Майклом Хиксом (Game Developer).

32. Ep. 4
    Два дизайнерских решения о том, как не запереть игрока снаружи — Pragmata, разом гоняющая головоломку и стрельбу, и как обращаться с тем, кто не может решить

    2026-06-03

    Сегодня два материала, оба кружащие вокруг одного вопроса с противоположных сторон: что может сделать дизайнер, чтобы игроков не заперло снаружи головоломки? Первый — интервью Game Developer (14 апреля 2026), в котором разработчики Capcom объясняют, как Pragmata, редкий «головоломочный шутер», накладывающий реальном времени Snake-подобную хакерскую головоломку, спроектирована так, чтобы не ощущаться повторяющейся. Второй — эссе геймдизайнера Cheryl-Jean Leo, написанное в 2017 году, «Are You Creating Impossible Puzzles?».

33. Ep. 3
    Грядущий на этих выходных Cerebral Puzzle Showcase и попытка вписать сам акт «ведения заметок» в головоломку

    2026-06-02

    Сегодня два материала. Первый — о трансляции Thinky Direct 2026 (28 мая) и запущенном ею Steam-мероприятии Cerebral Puzzle Showcase (Draknek & Friends, 28 мая — 4 июня), где собрались более 40 «думательных» (thinky) головоломок и заново очерчиваются контуры жанра. Второй — о небольшом дизайнерском решении в Trifoil, головоломке с линейным рисунком, чья DemoV2 (выпущена 28 мая) ввела функцию заметок, позволяющую рисовать прямо поверх головоломки. Мы рассматриваем это маленькое решение — не заставлять игрока полагаться на внешние инструменты для заметок.

34. Ep. 2
    Как проектировать когнитивную нагрузку игрока — двухслойная структура боя и головоломки и настройка кривой сложности

    2026-06-01

    Сегодня две темы. Интервью Game Developer с командой Pragmata от Capcom объясняет, как они заставили работать «двухслойный» дизайн, поставив поверх боя от третьего лица хакерскую головоломку в реальном времени в духе «Змейки». Вторая — девлог PurpleSloth о проектировании сложности, где рассказано, как уроки прошлой игры Chronescher перетекли в следующий тайтл TRAILS. Оба отвечают на один и тот же вопрос — как управлять когнитивной нагрузкой игрока — с противоположных сторон.

35. Ep. 1
    Картонное ремесло Amanita Design и крупнейшая витрина индустрии головоломок

    2026-05-30

    Сегодня две темы. Phonopolis от Amanita Design — приключение из картона ручной работы, создававшееся 10 лет, вышло 20 мая; и Thinky Direct 2026 от 28 мая, где было показано более 40 головоломок и запущен Cerebral Puzzle Showcase в Steam.