The puzzle is arguably one of the most popular games on the market. It’s been around since the first smartphone was created. Hundreds of developers, if not thousands, have made puzzle games that you can download on app stores.
If you intend to create a new puzzle game, you want to avoid some mistakes. To do this, you need to know what makes a good puzzle and how to make your game stand out.
Here are the mistakes you need to avoid while creating a puzzle game.
1. Don’t Break The Natural Progression
One of the ways to keep your players up to speed is to maintain progression tactics. It’s pointless to start a newbie on a grandmaster level jigsaw. They may only get discouraged and stop playing. As you develop your app, you need to show new features, mechanics, or ideas across all levels to help the player learn and figure out the game.
Some developers have the bad habit of offering microtransactions to players in exchange for skipping a level. They allow frustrated players to pay some few dollars to skip a level to make them less likely to quit. But when you do this, you don’t teach them how to solve puzzles. Instead, you remove the drive of persisting to progress in the game because a player can easily pay money to skip any challenging part.
2. Don’t Overuse Mechanics
Though some app developers love to use various mechanics to keep their games fresh and interesting, you need to limit them. You should know when to use them, the number to use, and when to introduce them.
You don’t want to develop a game that uses many mechanics at the start and then not use them again later. When that happens, players may completely forget about them. Great puzzles are those that use a bunch of mechanics at every level of the play. This makes the gameplay’s design level deep and much more organized. As a rule of thumb, you don’t want to use mechanics that a player won’t need for the next five levels. Instead, save them for later.
3. Don’t Get Too Familiar With Your Puzzles
There’s a common phenomenon that affects most developers who create PC and mobile puzzle games: they get really good at their puzzles. After making a game, they quickly play through the levels blinding themselves to how easy or difficult they are.
The levels may be easy for you as a developer, but quite challenging for people who’ve not been playing the game. This may result in creating a complicated game that players find demoralizing. To combat this problem, conduct playtests and get reviews on the level difficulty.
The Bottom-line
With so many puzzle games already on the internet, you need to create one that players can find interesting. Puzzles need to be a little bit challenging to invoke players’ thinking ability. However, it would be best if you avoided breaking progression, overusing mechanics, and getting too familiar with your puzzles. Your motivation shouldn’t be to create the most complicated puzzle in the world, but one that’s relatively easy yet quite challenging.
