Legend of Grimrock II Development Update: Puzzles

There’s a new blog post over at the official Legend of Grimrock website that focuses on puzzles and specifically describes one of the many ideas they have for the sequel’s puzzles: from its inspiration to the actual working prototype. Here’s an excerpt:

All in all, it’s impossible to predict exactly where the next idea comes from but no matter what their origins are, they’ll end up in the puzzle_ideas.txt in my dropbox. At this moment there’s about 40 unused ideas, many of which are very abstract and probably won’t end up as actual working puzzles, but others are much closer to reality and more ripe for use. Let’s take a look how one of the ideas ended up in the text file and how I took the idea to completion (as seen on the screenshot above) and how it changed along the way.

Here’s the original notes I wrote down about the puzzle:

– “16 steps”
– you need to travel from A to B taking exactly N steps along the way
– multiple routes are offered

But before I had even that, I had been playing some Slitherlink recently and I was thinking that could I somehow transform the classic puzzle into a Grimrock puzzle. In Slitherlink, the player draws a continuous line on a graph paper so I started thinking if the player party could in essence draw a similar continuous line by moving the player party in the grid of the game world. A difficult numbers problem, like that in the original Slitherlink, would be too cumbersome to grasp in the first person view of our game so I came up with a simpler idea: player would just need to cross the room reserved for the puzzle in a certain number of steps without crossing his previous path, thus drawing a squiggly Slitherlink-like continuous line through the room. At this point I stopped to write down the core idea for the (16 steps) puzzle in the puzzle_ideas.txt so that I could return to work on the idea later.

I’ve discovered that usually puzzles where the (rules) are simple but the solution is not, work the best so it was only natural that to improve this puzzle, I ended up making the rules simpler. After drawing a few possible room layouts for the puzzle on paper, I realized that counting the steps was an unnecessary rule since all I need is just a room with a funky layout where the player needs to step on all the squares. If the player makes it across the room but he hasn’t gone through all the squares, the puzzle won’t be complete and the exit door won’t open. This felt like a good starting point so I moved on into the Dungeon Editor to start hammering out a working prototype.