Are there any resources for motion-planning puzzle design?

Posted by Salano Software on Game Development See other posts from Game Development or by Salano Software
Published on 2011-03-20T02:26:07Z Indexed on 2011/03/20 8:17 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 153

Filed under:
|

Some background: I'm poking at a set of puzzles along the lines of Rush Hour/Sokoban/etc; for want of a better description, call them 'motion planning' puzzles - the player has to figure out the correct sequence of moves to achieve a particular configuration. (It's the sort of puzzle that's generically PSPACE-complete if that actually helps anyone's mental image).

While I have a few straightforward 'building blocks' that I can use for puzzle crafting and I have a few basic examples put together, I'm trying to figure out how to avoid too much sameness over a large swath of these kinds of puzzles, and I'm also trying to figure out how to make puzzles that have more of a feel of logical solution than trial-and-error. Does anyone know of good resources out there for designing instances of this sort of puzzle once the core puzzle rules are in place? Most of what I've found on puzzle design only covers creating the puzzle rules, not building interesting puzzles out of a set of rules.

© Game Development or respective owner

Related posts about design

Related posts about puzzle