I Designed Puzzles For The Largest Puzzle Game
697It only took days of filming but I have finally showcased my Islands of Insight puzzles in this video (including endgame spoilerstuff), technically the biggest project I was involved in, and I really enjoyed working with the devs and other designers etc.
This video is not sponsored, but there is unavoidable bias in the way I talk about the game etc. (directly biased in avoiding talking about large development-exclusive things, and indirectly biased against criticizing in an overly hard tone).
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2071500/Islands_of_Insight/
0:00 Opening
6:49 Pattern Grids
12:53 CBA
19:06 Harder Pattern Grids
25:51 My Best Puzzle
27:56 (while showing this deduction there's an accidental white cell here since I didn't undo everything whoops, but that cell isn't black anyway because it would soon restrict bottom-left to trying to fit two 5-size regions.)
29:33 My Best Puzzle (Icelands of Ice Height)
33:33 My Endgame Puzzles
41:53 """"""Review"""""" Why Did I Call This A Review When This Is More Like My Brief Perspective On The Game (and minor history of game, etc)
47:01 I'm Ironically Deeply Disincentivized To Test Puzzle Games Despite Doing It For Years
Some things I forgot to mention:
- I know all about Taiji's beta stuff, and when that game came out I was working on an edited video on the development of it. Unfortunately I couldn't find the motivation since it was hard to track down early versions of other areas besides the dice area, and the video is only 11 minutes long (and has bad mic quality).
- The previous old version of the game had rule discovery aspects phased out due to the livestreamness, but I'd also say that ultimately grid puzzles are actually harder to visually livestream than expected. Because look at how I'm showing logic, I actively show "if I do this, it's wrong", but this kinda ruins a perfect streak bonus, and there's no marking/highlighting/arrow system. Maybe that kind of system wouldn't really be used, but advanced concepts are not easy to show.
- Fun trivia about Taiji: The director of IOI was also a tester and guest puzzle author for Taiji, who showed a 'forward design' to the creator as a way to make puzzles. It's quite silly in hindsight that I didn't really *get* 'forward design' until I started making IOI puzzles. I guess Taiji might be too modal with its adding mechanic. And also forward design often doesn't make visually cool and symmetric puzzles. Which are all criticisms I noted at the time, but forward design really is the main method to try and test stuff IMO.
- Since I never got to experience this game in the 'right' order myself (I playtested many parts and often they were just individual dungeons in some random order) I am also less aware of how it feels to progress in order. I dunno, there are still many super hard puzzles in the game I haven't played, but I'm not sure it'd be interesting to do a stream trying to do those specifically. (plus I'm long past the phase of 'learning the basic intuition of all the puzzles'.)
Short games playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLg5Ta3CWcYX4X-lxcjqnig5Do-qXYNBt7
"secret" discord: https://discord.gg/V64JDvbWsf