How Jonathan Blow Designs a Puzzle | Game Maker's Toolkit

8:08 – I had a similar discovery process designing 5 color mana spell points for 5th edition DnD. Once the basic premise was in place, all the actual mechanics became self-evident, I just had to make sure it was "stable coding" across all the different casting classes.

Isn't that just inherent to the creative process? No good creator goes in with a fully fledged idea, you start with a few ideas and build outward from there, you revise over and over and workshop it with creative people you respect until you find something you're fully happy with.

I beg to disagree, The Withness is filled with puzzles that has no proper explanation, foreshadowing, hiting or even a resemblance of logic, sure once you figure it out, you can shoehorn a logic into it, or make an arbitrary rule that fits that, and only that puzzle, I cheated in the Withness and u know what, my experience was even better due to that, but to give you some examples. Color Lift, I watched a playthrou, I read the explanation, and it still makes no sense, there is no logical patter where a 2 colored room enviromentaly hits at you that u're suppose to remove X color to get Y. Same with the RGB house in the village, that think lacks every inch of graspable logic, and this is a pattern in The Withness if you don't see enviroment, hear sounds, or percive colors the exact way the developer does, you either brute force the puzzle or just say "fk it" and you drop the game or you watch a guide. Don't get me wrong, the game is good, but some puzzles ruin the players experience, not by being hard, I haven't complained about the tetris puzzles, those were fking brutal for me almost all the way throu, but there is logic behind it, a single easy to understand but hard to implement logic. When I get stuck and finaly figure out I find myself asking more that "How the fk I was expected to know that?" instead of the A-ha! moment. This game features 500+ puzzles, around 10 is soo uterly unreasonable, irrational, illogical, and lacks any inteligent designe that it almost made me drop this beautiful game. So do urself a favor, stop listening to the elitist pricks who say "YOU SHOUDN'T USE A GUIDE YOU'RE RUINING UR OWN EXPERIENCE" and use a guide in case you already thought throu every possible way you could think of, and you still don't get the answare. Shoehorning logic into something thats irrational, just beacouse there is 1 specific rule that applys to that single problem, not going to make u smarter, it only makes the game worst, beacouse we fail to accept its flaws.

Your videos are top notch. I’m not involved in games or game design, but the concepts in your videos often overlap with other disparate areas of my life such as dating, or language-acquisition. Thanks for such great content!

Say Jonathan blow backwards

I'll never get tired of good old Joe Blow.

3:44 Kappa

When I first saw a world puzzle in the Witness, I initially thought it was a neat Easter egg, how some of the landmarks resemble the puzzles themselves. Then, I think it was around the desert area, I actually clicked on one of these, and when the game responded, my mind was blown.

I disagree with the statement at about 6:25 regarding the puzzles feeling more fair. The Witness wasn't quite as bad but did suffer from some of Braid's incredibly abstract "puzzles" where it didn't follow any sort of discernible rules the game taught you or gave you clues about. A lot of it was only accomplishable by trying the most random ass thing you could think of enough times until you found something that worked. I also don't consider time trials to be particularly effective "puzzles." I was far more impressed by games like the Talos Principle, in both the puzzle execution and philosophy.

The Witness was one of the most frustrating games I have ever played, and I loved it.

He is actually now making his own language for programming games, He has his own YouTube channel were he just shows us what he, it's quit remarkable!

Blow has the honor of making one of the best and worst puzzle games ever

Just started The Witness a few days, oh my God, it is such a good and unique puzzle game. Didn't know til today it was designed and produced by the creator of Braid but it all makes sense now how it is so good!

This approach can be applied to teaching yourself a skill.
Present you with a simple problem and look how we normally would solve it. Look at all the other possibilities and how it could be apllied
The next step would be either a variant of it or a more complex (more layered) problem.

By doing so you learn the skill not simply applying a solution, it also teaches you adaptability

But, but, but…. The Witness is a LOT of "what was does the designer want me to do?". Maybe I'm just dense.

This Blow's my mind.

I have alot of respect for what is done with braid , i just found out about the game and as a platform developer i always let the programming start shaping itself to start coming up with unorthodox mechanics , he is on another level haha

Good video! I'm liked and share 904 times 😀

The Dark Souls of puzzles