This month we’ve been finishing up the coding of one of the later puzzles in the game: Fans of the daily word-connection puzzle game Circuits will enjoy this one. We play Circuits every day as a couple, and you can play it yourself at https://circuitsgame.com.
One of the other important things that I’ve done recently is edited the Steam game descriptions to include the phrase “rules discovery.” There are different approaches to puzzles games: A good many of them offer a more guided approach, especially puzzles that are more systematic in nature where the basic rules stay the same but the difficulty expands over time. That kind of game can introduce the player to basic concepts and carefully introduce and explain each new variation or added rules as they are introduced. I’ve been playing Afterburn’s Inbento lately and it’s a great example of this gradual approach. Other games just throw the player into the deep end, giving them freedom to explore and figure out the rules and even what they’re supposed to do. One of our favorite puzzle game series, The Room, has multiple different kinds of puzzles, few of them overlapping, and they don’t provide step-by-step explanations on how to solve each one. It’s a less guided approach but instead provides more immersion and offers a great deal of player satisfaction when you manage to figure out how a puzzle works without the game telling you at all.
There’s nothing wrong with either approach, but I feel like the most important thing is for any potential player to not be surprised at what the game offers: If you’re expecting one kind of game and it turns out to be another, that can be a bit of a bummer. Recently, as Puzzle Spy International was part of the Cerebral Puzzle Showcase and we launched our demo, a whole bunch of people got the chance to play our demo. One of the things that some people told us was that they were expecting the game to have (or BE) much more of a tutorial that slowly taught you how to play… and our demo clearly wasn’t that. Fortunately, other people offered feedback about how they had no idea what to do at first, but slowly figured out what the puzzle was looking for and then solved the entire puzzle. They reported experiencing a great deal of satisfaction from having figured everything out – sometimes with no hints at all – and managing to solve the entire puzzle. It’s THAT exact feeling that we’re shooting for in PSI: Not giving the players as much direction or tutorialization, and allowing for that rewarding feeling of puzzling your way out of a given problem. If we told you all the rules of a given puzzle, that would deprive the player of that awesome feeling of having pieced it together and solved it.
So anyhow, just something to keep in mind for when PSI eventually releases: We don’t give you a very guided walk-through on how to play each of the puzzles, and every one of them is totally different. Some of them are going to be recognizable and pretty simple to wrap your head around while other puzzles are going to take a bit more mulling over to decipher. We, as the designers, made a conscious choice to not give an overt tutorial for every single puzzle and hope that puzzle fans who appreciate that kind of challenge will enjoy the approach we’ve taken.