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Designing Puzzles
An RPG Maker Guide by GoodSelf
Welcome!
In this article, I’m going to do my best to teach you how to create your own puzzles for your RPG Maker games! If you ever wanted more than a boulder push puzzle, or a slippery tile puzzle, then I hope this article inspires you to create something fresh and new! Let’s get right into it!
P.S. Although I refer to RPG Maker MV in this article, the principles here can be used for any kind of maker!
Part 1 – The Idea
All puzzles begin with a simple, or not so simple idea. There is no right or wrong way to come up with a puzzle idea, but it helps to be familiar with a variety of mechanics from a plethora of different game genres. For example, you could re-create a game like Whack-A-Mole, have a set of trivia questions, a wall of switches that correspond to colors, a maze that changes paths – there are hundreds of ideas waiting to be discovered!
For this article, I’m going to be sharing my own puzzle ideas, and we will work out the basis for them together!
Now, I had two puzzle ideas I wanted to implement:
A Sight Based Puzzle. The player would be presented four different 3x3 grids, and would have to find what tiles are similar between them. Once the player finds this, they enter the answer on another 3x3 grid.
A Music Based Puzzle. The player would activate a statue that would play a song made up of three 5-second song clips. The player would have to select 3 songs clips out of 9 available clips and try to match the song exactly.
Once you have a puzzle idea in your head, its time to move on to the next part of the tutorial!
Part 2 – Implementation
RPG Maker MV excels at, well, making RPGS – but this software also has a lot of flexibility, and we can use this to our advantage when designing puzzles. I once made a Sudoku game in VX Ace by importing my own pictures, using the input number command, and whole lot of switches and variables. It was a beast of a project, but I felt rewarded in the end.
Keep in mind though, you don’t want to force your puzzle into the game – some ideas just aren’t meant to be made in MV, and that’s okay. Start with what you know, and work up from there. If MV can’t handle the puzzle you want to make, simply go back to Step 1 and try to come with another puzzle!
The more you know about the program, the more freedom you’ll have when it comes to designing puzzles. A newer player for example might not understand how use Movement Routes or show a picture, but once you do some research and experiment, these become tools to help you create puzzles! Let’s check in with the ideas we came up with earlier and see how we can implement them:
A Sight Based Puzzle
I went ahead and drew out all of my 3x3 tiles on paint to get a better idea of what the player will see.
The Four Tiles the player will see:
The correct answer to the puzzle:
The correct answer to the puzzle:
I realize that showing them the tiles is simple – just paint them onto the map. For the selection process however, I would need to create my 3x3 grid , each with an event on them. There are two types of events I’m going to use when implementing this puzzle:
Wrong Tile events set the tile to a different image, and add +13 to the variable “Correct Answer”. When you de-activate the Wrong Tile event, it will subtract 13 from the variable.
Correct Tile events set the tile to a different image, and add +1 to the variable “Correct Answer”. When you de-activate the Correct Tile event, it will subtract 1 from the variable.
Using this method, the only way for “Correct Answer” to equal 3 is if only the right 3 tiles are selected.
A Music Based Puzzle
I would have to create these music files myself, or have someone make them for me. I would need 9 different 5 second melodies – all of them in the same key. It’s important to have them all in the same key, as they all have to sound good together.
I’ll create 9 statue events – when you click on them, it will play the respective melody for that statue, then ask you if you want to turn the melody on or off. Once all the correct melodies are on, and the wrong melodies are off, the puzzle will be complete. We can use events very similar to the “Wrong Tile” and “Correct Tile” from the puzzle above to determine whether the player has the correct answer.
Did you notice that these puzzles are technically, exactly the same?
One uses Sight as its primary mechanic, and the other uses Sound. You’d be surprised by how many similarities you can draw from two unique puzzles!
Now that we know how to implement our puzzles, it’s time for the 3rd and final step!
Part 3 – Playtest, Playtest, Playtest!
I cannot stress this last point enough! Remember, as the creator of the puzzle, you have all the answers – your players on the other hand, do not. If you give them too much information, they’ll breeze right past your puzzle and then forget about it. If you give them too little, they’ll get frustrated, and you don’t want that to happen!
Finding a balance between difficulty and enjoyment has always been one of the greatest challenges in developing puzzles. The only way to get better, is to do. I’m eager to see what kind of puzzles you will create!
Feel free to post your feedback for this article below, as well as any puzzle ideas you have, or tutorials you’ve already made! Reading other people’s work can also help you when designing your own puzzles for your game.
Closing Thoughts
Thanks again for taking the time to read my article – if you’re interested in more unique puzzles, feel free to check my signature for a couple more simple puzzles I made in RPG Maker MV. Take care, and happy game making!
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or mathematical ones that are formed from phrases, such as I ate pie = i^(8*pi)
