what theory about puzzle/game logic should i read?

hey peeps

Ive now made 4 games, they are not the best else you would have heard of them, but the were what i needed to make in order to find out if i can do this thing. now I'm lost, i want to make something special, but i think i don't have enough theory behind me. does anyone have any prescribed material that one should give a read? or any suggestions?
maybe the community should get together and write a book - help other explore this medium.

how does on come up with puzzles? how does one make them fun?

Comments

  • i can design anything. draw me anything i can turn it into 3D/modeling/texturing/animations. i can even make the game. now i just need to think cleverly. i hope you understand where I'm coming from and what type of information i need.

    I've search amazon but all in get is actual puzzles i want to know how to make a puzzle from scratch.
  • If there were easy ways to do this, we'd have a lot more hit puzzle games on our hands.

    The best advice seems to be to focus on general creativity tools and attempt to come up with as many puzzles as possible. Basically, making something special seems to require a massive investment of some kind: Either it's time spent searching for a spark, time spent implementing, time spent failing completely or even money spent stealing and out-marketing someone else's idea (which is basically just parasitising whatever their investment was).

    So the logic for me has always been to figure out what it is I'm investing and then to to make sure I'm doing that as efficiently as possible. That's how prototyping works for me as a design strategy (and why I focused on communities of feedback that led to Game.Dev and MGSA) - it allows for more efficiency in terms of time/money spend per idea fail point without going into the business practices that I consider evil/exploitative.
  • edited
    Here is some cool info from Indie puzzle game developers:

    http://devmag.org.za/2011/04/16/how-are-puzzle-games-designed-introduction/

    This article has a link to 5 interviews with devs about puzzle design, which has some useful information about how they go about designing, prototyping, testing, and so on. (A lot of it boils down to what @dislekcia said). The info from the interviews is summarized here:

    http://devmag.org.za/2011/06/04/how-are-puzzle-games-designed-conclusion/

    But the original interviews will make it clearer how it applies to actual games.


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  • @hermantulleken thanks I'm looking at it right now!
  • Thanks @dislekcia - lets hope i learnt from the last 4.
  • edited
    i want to make something special, but i think i don't have enough theory behind me.
    The links @hermantulleken posted seem like some pretty great food for thought.

    I'm a bit skeptical of the usefulness of theory in designing games. I tend to think it useful as a communication tool, and sometimes as a spark that sets a creator on a path of novel creation. But I don't think theory is needed to make something special.

    That said, I quite like some of the things Daniel Cook has written. http://www.lostgarden.com/2008/07/directory-of-posts.html

    Daniel Cook designed Tripple Town (as I understand it). But his writing is mostly about process. He writes a lot about prototyping quickly and creatively...

    That said. There is this talk by Daniel Cook called: "Game Design Theory I Wish I had Known When I Started" ... So probably I'm wrong about the theory bit.

    Good luck! I don't want to say "Just keep making games and challenging yourself and you'll find your voice"... Well, I do want to say that, but I don't think that's an answer you haven't heard before. Definitely agree with @Dislekcia's point about making as many puzzles as possible and try become better at creation.
  • @@hermantulleken i had a look at that page you gave and, like @BlackShipsFilltheSky said it is pretty good food for thought. but I'm looking for how to actually engineer puzzles. This book looks interesting My Best Mathematical and Logic Puzzles

    thanks for the link @BlackShipsFilltheSky watching it now.
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    Good games are very, very, very seldom "engineered". The designers don't know that if they put exactly these things together, "fun" comes out.

    It's a lot of experimentation, curiosity, trying things, testing, showing to people, accepting feedback, not accepting feedback, not being discouraged, trying something else, trying something else still, etc.

    While it's great to absorb more and more information and learning, it's not a bunch of sources that will lead anyone to a good game, puzzle or not.
    Daniel Cook designed Tripple Town (as I understand it). But his writing is mostly about process. He writes a lot about prototyping quickly and creatively...

    That said. There is this talk by Daniel Cook called: "Game Design Theory I Wish I had Known When I Started" ... So probably I'm wrong about the theory bit.

    Good luck! I don't want to say "Just keep making games and challenging yourself and you'll find your voice"... Well, I do want to say that, but I don't think that's an answer you haven't heard before. Definitely agree with @Dislekcia's point about making as many puzzles as possible and try become better at creation.
    Agreed.
  • @Tusim thanks for your input
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    @hermantulleken i had a look at that page you gave and, like @BlackShipsFilltheSky said it is pretty good food for thought. but I'm looking for how to actually engineer puzzles. This book looks interesting My Best Mathematical and Logic Puzzles

    thanks for the link @BlackShipsFilltheSky watching it now.
    The book you linked to is even less of a puzzle engineering manual. However, it is extremely interesting.

    Michael Gardner is most surely the man who started my life-long fascination with mathematics, and his books introduced me to the many topics that still interest me today. That is were I first learned of polyominoes (the super set of Tetris blocks), Penrose tilings, Mobius bands, The Game of Life, and dragon curves... all of which is to some extent why our Grids package came out the way it did. (Except for Penrose tilings, we implemented all those things in Grids!)

    It is also were I first encountered some obscure abstract strategy games, and the idea of "solving" games and the concepts of "first player advantage" and so on. And while Gardner made Conway popular through The Game of Life, Conway did some other things that are even more fascinating.

    For one, he wrote some absorbing books on two player strategy games, five volumes of Winning Ways which I highly recommend if you are interested in such things. Now if you are looking for an engineering manual, this is the closest you will get (at least for this type of games); engineering is what you get when a mathematician looks at art, and this is what happens in these books---they are pretty hardcore. Although, I must add that he never looks at fun the way game designers do, it is the way somebody would look at bridge design without considering their "architecture", their aesthetics. So it won't help you make fun games. And while the tools of thought he develops are interesting (this is where surreal number were invented...to study games!) what I found most interesting was the many many many games described in these books.

    Finally, there are three books available for free that also deals with various topics in abstract strategy design (and at least to some extent formed the most direct inspiration for our Abstract Strategy package): Games of no Chance, which you can download here:

    http://library.msri.org/books/Book29/contents.html
    http://library.msri.org/books/Book42/contents.html
    http://library.msri.org/books/Book56/contents.html

    (The very first article is also by Conway, and is my favorite. It describes a simple two player game between an "Angel" and the "Devil" played on an infinite grid, where the goal is for the Devil to trap the Angel, and for the Angel to escape. It goes into the question of which types of Angel can defeat the Devil.)

    If you like the book you linked to I think there is a good chance you may like those.

    Like the other's said, theory won't help you necessarily design games that are more fun.

    However, these types of books are a great source of ideas (it is no accident that Tetris' inventor was a mathematician), and I think is a good supplement for the usual other sources of good ideas.


  • 2 complete practical books on the subject.

    1. Flash game development by example

    Here Emmanuel Feronato holds you by hand into building 9 small grid based games from simple concentration game up to a ballbalance game(combination of match 3 and physics game). Through out the book you will learn to implement flood fill algorithm correctly from simple 2d arrays up to arrays inside other arrays. The games that you will develop are concentration, minesweeper, connect 4, snake, Tetris, bejeweled, puzzle bobble and 2 others.

    2. Actionscript 3.0 game programming university by Gary Rosenzweig

    This book is similar to the one above, but this one is little bit harder to read because the author did not follow goof programming practices, for example, he did not use caps for globals and constants, and has not used classes, so u must read really slow to see how all the code fits together. Please read on Amazon to get full review of this book.

    3. Essential guide to flash games by Jeff Fulton and Steve Fulton

    The authors of this book wrote it before they became senior engineers at Zynga. Unlike the 2 books above, this one focuses building an entire engine that is able to handle yr games. Chapter 8 teaches Color drop puzzle game and chapter 9 modifies the game by adding a minimax algorithm, making an AI that can defeat a human being in a dice battle puzzle. By the end of the book you will have strong OO skills, understand bitmap rendering, pixel-level collisions, blitting, scrolling, building yr own particle system, reusable frameworks .
  • @hermantulleken thats some super awesome insight. i started watching that video by Daniel Cook and that got me super excited. already got Game Feel: A Game Designer's Guide to Virtual Sensation that he recommended. Downloading all those pages right now and combing them into a single pdf. thanks i think I've got a lot of reading to do.

    @SkinnyBoy thank you for your insight as well, I'm not really a programmer and thus won't be able to follow those coding examples. but I'm definitely going to look at the articles. if you do happen to find them in c# i will take a gander.

    thanks everyone for there insight.

    rock on!
  • @BlackShipsFilltheSky last night i finished that video you suggested - amazing.

    these are the three books that he recommends

    A theory of fun for game design
    Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design
    Game Feel: A Game Designer's Guide to Virtual Sensation

    thanks so much the information. i have 2 of the 3 books so far - I'm get on that.
  • edited
    @subjectZero Good luck!! I hope that information, and the heaps of other information others here have posted, inspire you and enable you to make special things!!

    Also, I suggest, if you do feel inspired to try out an idea, put down the book/paper/video and just try it out.

    I mean, don't get to the end of parsing all this theory and then expect to be able to put it all into practice. Try out each idea as you go along. There's a great divide between knowing the theory and being able to use it, and that divide is best bridged with practice (in fact it might only be able to be bridged with practice).

    The theory will give you a lot of interesting departure points to make things. Seize that opportunity!! Even if you just spend a couple hours making one mechanic, trying it out can enable you to understand the concept intuitively, as apposed to just knowing the words.
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  • Take a look at Rules of Play by Eric Zimmerman. Fantastic read on game design theory in general. It's quite broad but it has some golden content. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/rules-play
  • Eric said:
    Take a look at Rules of Play by Eric Zimmerman. Fantastic read on game design theory in general. It's quite broad but it has some golden content. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/rules-play
    I had a looked at the index and it looks very thorough, you don't perhaps own a copy of it?
  • @subjectZero I sure do. Where are you situated? It's collecting dust on my bookshelf so you could definitely borrow it for a while.
  • @Eric hey sorry for the late reply, I've been so busy. i stay in PTA waterkloof area and you?
    so i started reading Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design and they have the most amazon flash app that is included Machinations you can download the stand alone there as well. what it does is let you simulate your mechanics. it goes hand in hand with the book. check it out its awesome.

    the book says before one starts with this advanced mechanics one should look at Fundamentals of game design And honestly I'm giving this a read first. i lack the most basic fundamentals. But I'm sure after completing these two books i think i will know what is going on.

    having said that i would still love to check out that book of yours.

    rock on!
  • edited
    These fine people probably already answered your question, but I'm not discouraged by such trivial things as "logic" :P.

    The best advice I can offer myself, when it comes to puzzle games, or games in general, is to put a lot of focus in the 'learning curve'. Valve excels at this and is demonstrated by their works such as 'Half Life(2)' and more notably, 'Portal'. In fact 'Portal' is nothing BUT one long learning experience. I recommend browsing youtube and search for "Extra Credits" and more importantly "Game Design Club", where the design of games are discussed. One video in particular would interest you:

    As for books to read, I recommend googling "Art of game design, a book of lenses", which discusses the a-z of everything game related, though the books you were recommended so far are all pretty good too.

    EDIT: Just a side note, making games is like Alchemy. It is a combination of science and magic. ANY and ALL forms of backgrounds, from maths to history to...sheep herding, can be used as inspiration for making an engaging game. The key to making a fun game is asking "why the player plays".
  • edited
    I found that my Formal Logic classes at uni give a really good base for the way I approach puzzle making, first off you are able to identify logical concepts, analyse the problem and then construct a solution. With a puzzle game you would be making the problem too. There are even some classes of problems that can be made into a variety of different specific problems/puzzles. Also looking into some historical and well known logical paradoxes, tautologies and contradictions can be inspiring.

    Maybe a book on Formal Logic is a good base book for your puzzle inspirations?
  • thank you @Galacticuz and @critic for your input, i like what you've said.

    rock on!
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