Adventures In Level Design: Wherein I Complete My First Puzzle

With a little bit of elbow grease and some colored lighting, I have successfully designed a puzzle.

In all her glory. I can’t get that potato off the Portal Device, but whatever.

Having learned my lesson about slap-dash level design from my previous failure, I decided to be very careful and efficient when designing this one, but I was also able to retain some of the ideas that I liked from that puzzle. I began by making the following chart:

I divided all the elements I wanted in the puzzle into three categories. First, the various switches that would need to be switched to complete the puzzle. Second, each item controlled by those switches. And third, the tools in the test chamber that would assist the player in interfacing with those switches.

When looking at the puzzle in this model, the way to make a difficult puzzle becomes very clear; create more controlled items and less tools. In my particular puzzle, the Excursion Funnel needs to be used three times for three different tasks, and the Cube (once acquired) needs to be used on two occasions. Tools that have more than one purpose are absolutely essential for making a puzzle interesting and challenging.

However, not all elements of a puzzle can be accounted for using this particular model. World geometry is often a core part of a good puzzle, as what elements you have access to can change depending on where in the puzzle you’re standing. I’m going to try to come up with a different model to design puzzles in that can account for this, besides just drawing a picture, as that requires you to have an idea that is almost fully realized before you can begin the actual work. Not to mention the room for human error it leaves, as I learned the hard way.

If you’d like to download my puzzle to try and solve it, here is a link!