ThinkyCon 2025

FLEB

What Donald Judd's 1964 Art Essay "Specific Objects" Means To Me

Caroline Clark, Queensguard Games

Thinky games are emotional experiences, and designing with those emotions in mind will help you build better games

Adam Saltsman, Finji

CorgiSpace, or, short legs on purpose, or, my approach to making small games

Craig G. Anderson, Zack Carpenter, and Nasim Eshgarf

Playful Puzzle Mechanics - updates on puzzle game research

Jagriff

Using a puzzle solver to aid design, discovery, QA, and playtesting

Patrick Traynor

The Programming of Patrick's Parabox

vexorian

People Hate Puzzle Games, but...

John August and Corey Martin

Adapting a Word Game: How Alphabirds Became Birdigo

Anastasia Miliano, Inkwell Games

We Built for Grandparents First, Then Discovered We'd Built for Everyone

JohnLee Cooper

Is a Puzzle Game Without An Undo Still A Puzzle Game?

Gwen C. Katz, Nightwell Games

Puzzle Design through Curriculum Design

Wiebke Spieker, Hemisquare

Art of Nurikabe World: Bringing a pen-and-paper classic to life without ruining it

Ivan Koswara (chaotic_iak)

Mathematics for Puzzles 2

Ludipe

What puzzle games can learn from Nicolas Cage

Dan Wiseman, The Detective Society

The puzzle that launched a games company

dietzribi

You vs You - Designing puzzles where you play against yourself

Greg Filpus (Aspeon)

Metapuzzles: From Puzzlehunts to Puzzle Games

Daniel King, The Boston Globe

Newspapers, Games, and "Newspaper Games"

Matt MacLean, Generic Lake Monster

Leveraging Thinky Principles For Accessible Design

Alastair Aitchison, Playful Technology

The Rules of the Game: Modelling Puzzles as Constraint Satisfaction Problems

Andrew Plotkin

Towers of Pen: puzzle experiences that zoom out and out

Cerise Talis

Silly reasons to not make a puzzle game

Sylvia Aguiñaga, Ánimo Games

Cute Enough to Try, Clear Enough to Solve: Approachability in Star Stuff

Dom Camus

A Journey Into Space

Nick Chen, PlayMath.org

Mathy Thinky Puzzly Problem Solving: Today's Most Important Skill

Levente Bodnár and Zsombor Fehér, EmptyMatter

Designing for Discovery - Lessons from Hungarian Maths Education

Thomas Brunet

Composing Music for Chants Of Sennaar: The Soundtrack of Storytelling Puzzles

Ethan Clark

Making Multi Purpose Puzzles

Daria Jerjomina

Designing Puzzles Based on Real Languages

Dennis Ramirez & Charlie Mackin, Videogame Workshop

Adults Can’t Count Either: Design Tricks We Used at PBS That Apply to All Games

Terry DuBois

Be Your Own Playtester with Random Number Generation

Charlotte Pang, Queensguard Games

How to make cute, speedy 2D Animations in Google Slides!

Jackson Nagy, Starmaps

Under the Hood of Stumbling in Puzzle Games

Perttu "Borb" Tuovinen, borbware

Using a fantasy console for serious gamedev

Tonda Ros, Dogubomb

Testing Blue Prince