ThinkyCon 2024

The Art and Craft of Puzzle Design

Samarth Hattangady

This is a practical talk all about puzzles in games. We explore the different reasons that we might want to add puzzles in our games as well as how to go about doing that. Starting from prototyping and ideation, we cover the various steps in the creation of a system that is ripe for designing puzzles. We look at the different factors of how to judge puzzles, their quality and difficulty. We end with going a little deeper and discussing how games as the perfect medium of exploration and interaction, and how puzzles can be a vehicle to do that.

Making Messier Games, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying So Much About Possibility Spaces

Tom Methven / Amicable Animal

While making SOLAS 128, I became completely consumed exploring the possibility space of its ruleset. But do we kid ourselves believing players care about that as much as designers do?

Let’s instead talk about the joy and challenges of making a messier puzzle game and how to ground puzzles in a 3D world using classic visual design techniques. We might even find more in common between these two seemingly different styles of puzzle game than meets the eye…

Puzzle games and alternative controllers

Kalinarm

Let's talk about videogame situations that go beyond the screen. This blurs the link between video games, interactive installations and escape games. The combination of puzzle games with customized controllers and alternatives opens the way to new and exciting gaming situations.

Stop Developing Thinky Games for Other Thinky Developers

Xalavier Nelson Jr.

A lot of thinky developers, especially early in their careers, are making their games to reach an audience of their peers and mentors--rather than players. By interrogating that impulse and discussing the thinky and thinky-adjacent work of Strange Scaffold, I hope to provide a brief demonstration of the wider, broader player base excited to see the future of thinky creations - if we build things capable of reaching them.

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Mathematics for Puzzles

chaotic_iak

Puzzles are known to help train problem solving skills for more "serious" subjects such as mathematics. This talk explores the other way around: how mathematics can apply in puzzle design. For example, loop-drawing puzzles often involve parity, and a general deduction step in Yin-Yang puzzles comes from topology. This talk will mainly discuss pencil puzzles such as Sudoku and Slitherlink, but the general rule about puzzle design is applicable broadly.

How we put 10,000 handmade puzzles in Islands of Insight

Elyot Grant

Elyot Grant, CEO and Game Director at Lunarch Studios, will discuss how his team of 27 puzzle designers produced the staggering collection of over 10,000 handmade puzzles in Islands of Insight. The talk will touch on creative, production, puzzle design, curation, testing, tools, and more.

The Case for Procedural Generation in Puzzle Games

Jonah Segree

Procedurally generating interesting puzzles at runtime is an underutilized tool in puzzle game design. This talk will cover some of the benefits and drawbacks of live PCG, as well as a guide showing how you can implement procedurally generated puzzles from a design and technical perspective, using examples from popular puzzle games and my own projects.

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Tips to make programming your game less hellish

Caroline Clark

Making games in small teams or solo is more possible than it’s ever been, and you can see this in the explosion of indie games and game jams. Yet you might find that, as you take your three-day caffeine powered game jam project to being a fully fledged masterpiece, you have a sinking feeling that you’re building it “wrong”, but you can’t figure out why or what to do about it. I will talk about the time sinks I’ve found in coding, give examples for common pitfalls and give you practical tips to help you make your indie games.

Baba is Cool: the journey of level design in the classroom

Isi Cano

Baba is cool is a compilation of levels created by 11-12 year old students using the level editor of Baba is You, a puzzle video game that challenges you to break the rules of the game itself and to manipulate them until you find a way for objects to interact with each other. The rules are blocks, and when you manipulate them you change the way they interact with each other. I would like to talk about how I use this thinky game and its level editor in my elementary school classes.

From my personal experience, I will show the benefits of using video games in school, and how they can help to motivate children aged between 10 and 12 to learn different skills.