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FLEB
This is a short talk about an essay I found while reading about some cool looking art. We'll talk about how I came across it, what it means to me, and how I've used it in making my own games, from Extrareality Codebreaker to Strange Jigsaws.
Caroline Clark, Queensguard Games
Games are emotional experiences. This is very clear in genres like first person shooters or adventure games. However, thinky games are about logic and deduction, and it’s not immediately clear that emotions are even present, let alone important. I will make the case that despite appearances, thinky games are indeed emotional experiences, and in articulating how different mechanics create different emotions, we can better understand why some thinky games stick with us longer than others, and what to consider when building our own.
Adam Saltsman, Finji
I've made and released 14 games in the last 12 months, all in my very limited free time, and had a super fun time doing it, even though I also make games for my day job! This talk is about how I did this and what I've learned, including focusing on things that are easy to do (but not obvious!), how I am separating my "ideas" from their "formulations", how important it is to notice things, and why you should design like a player.
Craig G. Anderson, Zack Carpenter, and Nasim Eshgarf
In this talk we will detail our research comparing onboarding approaches in Baba Is You - a pop-up tutorial, showcasing mechanics, and encouraging tinkering. We also detail our interviews with 25 puzzle game developers to investigate patterns in how individual puzzles and puzzle games are designed to teach players how to play and progress.
Jagriff
Despite the sensationalist title, this talk is about a puzzle solver AI agent - not generative AI. A puzzle solver can be a valuable tool for puzzle design, experimentation, testing, and more. However, it is not a substitute for solid design principles. It may also impose extra restrictions.
Patrick Traynor
This talk covers a few specific programming implementations from the development of Patrick's Parabox, an award-winning recursive sokoban game released in 2022. Specific topics include rendering a recursive sokoban world, robust block shrinking and growing animations, and handling infinite loops. Pseudocode and slow-mo demonstrations will be shown for each.
vexorian
A year ago I watched a ThinkyCon talk and learned some shocking revelations about Alexander the Great. It might be true that people hate puzzles, but maybe that's not the whole story...
John August and Corey Martin
John and Corey discuss how AlphaBirds, a multiplayer physical card game, became Birdigo a single player deckbuilder video game. Topics include design challenges, creative choices and long-distance collaborative workflows.
Anastasia Miliano, Inkwell Games
We built a daily logic puzzle platform specifically for people aged 60-80 who'd never played puzzle games—an underserved market with time, money, and fewer competitors. Surprisingly, this approach—crystal-clear rules, lower difficulty curves, milder art—made our game better for everyone, including younger casual players seeking a "morning wakeup" ritual. We'll share specific design decisions for older audiences and why the thinky games community should care about this demographic.
JohnLee Cooper
Going through two different puzzle games I've made that lack an undo feature, and seeing how and why the results varied, and examining how genre expectations color player's experience with the games.
Gwen C. Katz, Nightwell Games
Puzzles have a lot in common with curriculum: They both present you with novel information, teach you to generalize it in new situations, and create “Aha!” moments. But while there’s little research on how the brain interacts with puzzles, there are decades of research on how brain science applies to curriculum. Using my background as a curriculum designer, I show how guided-inquiry curriculum uses this science to guide minds through the learning process and how we can use the same systems to build puzzles that are more engaging, accessible, and fun.
Wiebke Spieker, Hemisquare
When we set out to make Nurikabe World our goal was to present the classic pen-and-paper puzzle as a 3D landscape. From the start, we had one core rule: never let the graphics interfere with the puzzle. In this talk, I will present the art of Nurikabe World and the lessons we learned along the way.
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