Making a Fireball Puzzle
/Hello everyone! Nick here again, with a deeper dive into our puzzle creation process.
Last month, I wrote a post about how we make puzzles generally. That post was pretty abstract, and I got feedback requesting specific puzzle examples (thanks Superrodan!) So, in this post, I want to dive deep into a specific puzzle and explain my thought process for developing it.
Spoiler Warning! This post is going to brush over the majority of the first floor of the Vault of Fire. If you want to experience the game completely blind, I recommend backing out now. We are still at least one year from release, though, so the likelihood of remembering these low-level details upon release seem pretty slim.
Fireball Only
With a spell this juicy who even needs anything else?
The Vault of Fire is the third Vault in Valley of Shadow, and introduces the Fireball spell. Like the two Vaults before it, I wanted to focus the entire first floor on getting the player used to casting the spell. At this point in the game, there are two other spells available, but I minimize their usage on the first floor so the player can really master Fireball. Once they achieve that mastery, I add the other spells back in, and start really creating some crazy puzzles. But the first floor focuses entirely on Fireball.
Fireball Mechanics
Fireball was used to melt through the ice (left) and heat the sensor (bottom right) to solve the puzzle & open the door (top right)
I want to detail the puzzle "Wallhopper", which is the "final boss" of the first floor. As such, it should take everything that the player has learned so far and combine it all into a single puzzle. Before we can really explore that, though, we have to know what the player has learned! Fireball essentially has 4 core mechanics:
Only 1 Fireball can be active at a time.
Fireball melts ice.
Fireball heats Heat Sensors.
Fireball rounds corners.
On top of fireball, Heat Sensors have a few unique mechanics of their own. There can be any number of Heat Sensors in a puzzle, and they must all remain hot to solve the puzzle. If you solve the puzzle and then remove fireball from the Heat Sensors, the puzzle will actually un-solve, putting you right back where you started.
These broken-down mechanics outline the entire first floor; there is 1 puzzle per mechanic that I just outlined.
Fireball melts ice - An empty room with ice between you and the exit.
Fireball heats Heat Sensors - A room with naught but a single Heat Sensor.
Sensors must remain hot & only 1 active fireball - A room with a Heat Sensor and Ice, you must figure out how to heat up both simultaneously.
Multiple sensors - A room with 3 Heat Sensors, far enough away that you have to be precise with fireball (and thus limit the odds of solving it by accident)
Fireball rounds corners - A room with a Heat Sensor behind a wall with holes in it.
The Puzzle: Wallhopper
The whiteboxed puzzle. It will look much prettier after Anthony gets his paws on it
With those mechanics in mind, I want to design a puzzle that utilizes all of them at once. Here's an implementation of each mechanic:
Fireball melts ice - Add blocking ice to the puzzle
Fireball heats Heat Sensors - Add a heat sensor to the puzzle
Sensors must remain hot - Trick player into casting Fireball again after heating the Sensors - E.G. put ice between the solution location and the exit.
Multiple sensors - Add more than 1 Sensor to the puzzle
Fireball rounds corners - One of the sensors is around the corner from the other
It's fairly trivial to satisfy most of these at once - add some ice and a few sensors around a corner from each other and voila. The trickiest one is #3, putting ice between the player and the exit. Fortunately, I had Anthony's level design to go off of. He wanted stairs in this room, so I used that as a jumping off point. Literally. To solve the puzzle, you must melt through ice then walk up stairs to get to the Heat Sensors, but once you heat the Sensors the ice behind you re-forms. The player is trapped behind the ice wall, and must use the stairs' slope to jump to a railing and leave the area after solving the puzzle.
Testing & Refinement
The before & after designs in miro
As I mentioned in the previous post, I strive to test my puzzles with real players ASAP, as the feedback is often invaluable. Wallhopper is a perfect example of this. I designed the puzzle, whiteboxed the whole thing out, and the first two people that played it solved it in an unintentional way, making the puzzle much easier than it should be. The problem was the stairs - the way they were configured, the player didn't have to go through the ice at all, and could solve the puzzle just from the top of the stairs. This totally removes mechanic #3 from the solution, which is what lends all the difficulty to the puzzle!
It took me a bit to figure out how to solve this, mostly because I stuck too close to the original level design. I didn't want to change what Anthony had provided at all, and that made it difficult to reconfigure the puzzle. Eventually, I figured out a way to redesign the room without sacrificing its general feel. It still has stairs, they just go in a different direction now, which forces the player through the ice. This was kind of an a-ha moment of my own. In future puzzle redesigns, I won't hesitate so much to completely redo a room design.
Conclusion
I hope this serves as a good peek behind the curtain for anyone interested. To create Wallhopper, I deconstructed Fireball into its constituent mechanics, taught each mechanic one-by-one, then combined them all for a “final boss”. Along the way I learned some valuable lessons, the most memorable of which is to not be afraid to change the original design to suit the puzzle.
If you’ve read this far, my sincere thanks! If you have any questions or improvement suggestions, I would love to hear them!