Awesome game, made me create the account here just to thank you. Took me 2 weeks to finish, but it was worth it. If I may ask, how do you create so difficult puzzles? I mean, when you design a hard level, I suppose you don't know immediately it's solvable, do you? Can you please shed some light on the process?
Viewing post in Give Up the Ghost: a puzzle checklist comments
Yes, I like to say creating a puzzle is a lot like solving a puzzle :)
I always had a document open while making levels. Any time I saw a surprising edge-case or something unintuitive or cool happened, I would write that down in the document.
Each level started with me trying to force the player to do one of the cool things in the document. Sometimes, the conditions were specific enough that it was basically a full puzzle on its own. Sometimes it wasn't hard enough, so I then had to add complications and test to see if it was still possible.
The most important thing was iteration. Usually, my first draft of a level wasn't very good. Every time I worked on the game, I would go through a few levels I had already "finished" and made sure I still liked those levels. I tried to simplify each level to align with its core ideas. If I was unsatisfied with some part of the level, I would try to make small changes to improve it. If I thought the level was now overshadowed or just bad I would scrap it completely.
This iterative process slowly turned a lot of initially mediocre levels into interesting and challenging ones.