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Thanks, I figured it out. This one took me a while…

I have no idea how Steven Miller came up with these puzzles. Is AI or something else used to find puzzles that have only one solution? It’s got to be hard to come up with so many puzzles that so many people think are “impossible” but yet are completely solvable. It’s unlike pretty much any other puzzle game in this respect.

Also, most puzzle games keep introducing a new mechanic with new pieces added to the puzzle that have new properties to keep it interesting, but for the most part, in Pull-Chain everything is there from the start, maybe adding a few things like the snowball, web, and the 2-level mechanic, but other than that, it is just about using things you always could, but just didn’t have the need or environment to use or discover them.

Thanks for making it, Mr. Miller!

Steven Miller18 days ago(+2)

My general process is starting with a property of one of the mechanics or an interaction between multiple mechanics that I find interesting. Once I have that, I think about some interesting outcomes of that property/interaction, specifically looking for ones that differ from what you could normally do if that object/group of objects wasn’t present. Then I just need to make a layout where that outcome needs to happen in order for the puzzle to be solved. If nothing comes to mind, I usually consider adding additional mechanics to make these differences more meaningful (the webs are actually a good example of this). This is probably way too vague, so here is a quick example from the game:

Snow: Vault

In this case, the property I started with was that snow can be destroyed instead of needing to be pushed out of the way. One outcome of this is that snow trapped against the wall isn't an obstacle like a typical crate would be. There are a lot of potential ways to make use of this property, but I thought the most interesting one was using the snow to push two wood blocks simultaneously without getting them stuck to each other. From there, it was mainly about finding the right button placements. The hardest part of designing this level was actually just making sure the player couldn't accidently stumble into the mechanics explored in areas 4 and 5.

Stephen’s Sausage Roll pretty heavily shaped my taste in puzzle mechanics, it has a similar style where most of the mechanics are introduced right at the start and later puzzles just force you to interact with them in new ways.

itch.io

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