Anonymous User asked: how did you get into designing puzzles? do you have any advice for people looking to start designing?
after falling in love w/ puzzles thanks to professor layton, i learned about nikoli-style abstract logic puzzles online and, in particular, i discovered grandmaster puzzles and the wider logic puzzle blogosphere. went around archive-bingeing for a while until i started getting ideas of my own, whereupon i busted out mspaint and started posting puzzles to twitter. eventually got discovered and invited to online logic puzzle communities, where i’ve been a terror ever since.
as for advice on starting out, i think a good foundation for constructing puzzles is having solved a lot of puzzles. fundamental concepts and patterns tend to reappear across many puzzle types, and at a certain point of familiarity you’ll be decently equipped to handle almost anything, whether solving or constructing. it’s also helpful for just identifying what you enjoy the most; over time i’ve developed my own tastes for genre and theming.
when seeking out puzzles to solve, i strongly suggest sources that primarily host handcrafted puzzles, as opposed to puzzles automatically generated by a program. generation has its place, but generated puzzles are often severely limited in terms of expressiveness, logically and aesthetically. among handcrafted sources, i highly recommend the aforementioned grandmaster puzzles, though do note that they recently switched to a subscription model so much of their latest content is paywalled, but all of the puzzles published on their blog before then (years of them!) remain freely accessible. other personal standouts are the blogs of ihnn, jack lance, jamie hargrove, and mellowmelon, and i would be remiss to not shout out fellow logic puzzlers active on here such as @steal, @wisprabbit, and @babudarabu.
once you do get started proper, an important thing to exercise is something called “forward design”—that is, constructing a puzzle by placing clues first, solving what you can, then placing more clues based on your current progress, repeating the process until you have a complete puzzle. this is contrasted with “backward design”, wherein you start by drawing up a solution first, then place clues retroactively until that solution is guaranteed. we emphasize forward design to ensure the greatest control over the “solve path”—that is, the sequence of steps you expect a solver to make as they solve your puzzle. @deusovi made a nice guide demonstrating what this process can look like.
the tools i use to construct puzzles nowadays are the online interfaces puzz.link, penpa+, and kudamono. puzz.link and kudamono each supports a specific set of puzzle types, providing individual editors for each of them, whereas penpa+ is a more generalized editor that can support almost any grid-based puzzle type, though its interface is consequently more crowded—it takes some learning.
that’s all i got for ya, for now! lmk if there're some finer points you want me to cover. i’m not the most prolific puzzler, but i love taking every opportunity to talk about puzzles.
