How to Make a Great Puzzle Game

that's because for every product designer that can tell good from bad, there are 10's of pretenders who dont know what they're talking about.

The stakeholders don't have the time or expertise to vet (otherwise, they'd be product designers themselves!). Thus, they need objective verification. This is what turns into the 'matter of testing the idea'.

But to get beyond that - and getting beyond playtesting, data-collection and other brute force feedback mechanisms entails doing so - one has to systematically devise original feedback signals - pass-fail checklists, writers' rubrics, dependency graphs, workout logs and so on. Once you have the framework in hand and have validated its philosophical premise to some degree, you can feed your work and ideas through it and it automatically corrects you and guides the ideas away from major fallacies.

Of course, some amount of experimental data helps, but the huge amounts we have grown accustomed to have a habit of producing a lot of busywork - a product tuned and tweaked and prodded to improve this or that short-term KPI or audience appeal metric - without striking at the critical issues that one can probe with a bit of followthrough on self-feedback.

Your tech talks are also awesome.

A bit offtopic, but could you remove the fixed widths of your #content (.baby-container) at screen width below 767px ? 300 pixels is just too narrow for the content. Maybe set width to auto and set margin to 15px for a better responsive experience? :)

Although their games are mass mass market, they still feel opinionated. Their designs have a certain Nintendo-ness to them that's persisted for decades in almost all their games. Even when they partner up with a third party their design shows through.

If they had extensive playtesting early on I would think their uniqueness would be eroded. It obviously hasn't. Most recently Nintendo set the bar for what an open world game should be like with their take. Not just in quality but by applying their method they elevated the genre.

Audience maximization is almost literally regression towards the mean to maximize profit. It implies cutting corners ; but some of these corners are actually making your game stronger, they're giving it its personality.

Think of "Dwarf Fortress", "brogue", or even "Minecraft". What kind of feedback do you expect to get from most players? Better graphics? Real-time play? Would it make the game stronger?

The idea you're exploring might be more akin to the Mario Cram School[1] which involved getting staff across all of Nintendo, not just designers, creatively exploring Mario development. But straight up assuming that Nintendo's approach towards design makes it a thumbs-up dismisses notions people have that newer Nintendo games overuse tutorials to the point of infantilising the audience.

[0] https://www.destructoid.com/nintendo-seal-of-quality-becomes... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBXZ5lqdZQ8

That said, you can always be surprised, and it’s delightful when this happens, so you don’t want to get on an egotistical high horse and decide you really know the system without playing it. The actual experience of the actual system is your reality check.

But, the more experience you have with that system, the more you can see where things might go (unless it’s intensely chaotic, thus unplayable).

That does not make it worse than other puzzle games, just annoying in parts. Especially its huge reliance on perception as opposed to actually thinking and figuring things out, but then it's not quite a puzzle game. It's more of a big escape room game which does have puzzles in it. There are others on the market, few are well known.

(Even something like Antichamber is more of a puzzle game than Witness, yet it is still an escape room rather than a pure puzzle game.)

A relevant contrasting comparison would be to something like The Talos Principle which was heavily playtested including some puzzle redesigns, reordering, some having been dropped. Puzzles were also automatically checked to be doable in desired and a few atypical ways.

The other design principles apply though the same - minimalism, tutorial principles and difficulty scaling.

Antichamber has the guns and blocks and physics, Talos has the few tools and pseudophysics, Witness has varying puzzle mechanics but one input with tons of output.

The difference is the degree of things being hidden. Puzzles with hidden pieces tend to become adventure games. It does not matter if you have to carry the pieces or if they're already in place.

I didn't like Portal 2's official single player campaign as much as the first Portal, but the two-player coop mode is excellent, and a rare example of multiplayer puzzling.