Posted February 12, 2024 by TheoHuang
I've been thinking about how to design good puzzlers for our game for a while now. I needed to find inspiration first. I started by identifying the two most important elements we needed for our puzzles: visual pictures and a test of logical thinking. Then I came up with a very special source of inspiration: the Chinese Civil Service Exam. In China, people who want to enter the government as civil servants need to take and pass this exam. In this exam, besides some basic knowledge and law-related questions, there is also a category of logic test questions. I then went to search for related contents. There were indeed many questions designed in the form of pictures. And these questions are almost without words, which is also very much in line with my requirements.
I found this one, and the many triangles in this puzzle made me think of the idea of using the sides of polygons in puzzle design.
I thought of this because when I solving the puzzle, I had considered whether the logic of the puzzle would have anything to do with the number of sides of the triangles. Although the answer proved that the sides were not part of the logic of the puzzle, the idea of using the sides in the puzzle design reminded me of a puzzle I designed in my first year of college. That puzzle involved the solver observing hexagons to think logically. I combined Zimu's idea of the butterfly pattern from last semester and created the following puzzle.
I presented this puzzle to my professor at last week's team meeting. I got a lot of valuable feedback. But then I found a bug in the puzzle: one butterfly was in the wrong position. This can directly lead to player confusion. Thanks to Zimu for pointing this out in testing. I then fixed the bug and also wrote the first number in the puzzle. This is a sort of hint to help the player solve the puzzle. More hints I plan to place in rooms in the game as collectible items. This will also increase the number of collectible items. Enrich the content of the game. I will learn from the design process of this puzzle to help me design the next two puzzles. Hopefully everything will go well.