I’ve spent the past eight months or so preparing a course of three lectures on puzzle game design, and those are now publicly available. I probably should have posted here about them already, so apologies if this is old news to you, but if it’s new news to you then…congratulations!
The overall structure of the course is outlined at the beginning of the first lecture, but to give you a bit of a sense of what the course covers: The first part is focused on overall game design tips; things that are useful on a very high level perhaps no matter what kind of game you are making. The second part is focused on puzzle design in particular, with many tips and techniques to improve the focus and clarity of your puzzle designs. And the final part (the most important part, in my opinion) is focused on how best to structure and present those puzzles to the player.
So far the feedback on the course has been very positive and people have told me they are getting a lot out of it even if they don’t specifically design puzzle games. (Though the course, of course, is mostly targeted towards intermediate puzzle game designers).
The entire course is available on a single playlist here.
I hope that this course will help a new generation of game designers to really push their games up to the next level of quality. And if it doesn’t, at least I’ve tried and now I can complain without a whiff of a guilty conscience!
Taiji 