unforum

[crazy-jake]

Looking for help fomulating puzzles

[kwool]

I would warn you not to be overly reliant on puzzles in your ARG. I realize many ARGs are puzzle-heavy, but I find them to be huge deterrents to new audiences. True interaction trumps overly cumbersome puzzles--every time. No doubt, a great puzzle is always something fun to have in an ARG--and something really rewarding for players as well.

Just my opinion about it! Each ARG is different, as is each audience!

[Ofiuco]

Here's a tip from a once-and-future puzzlemaker:

Don't be devoted to the idea of a puzzle as a concrete, bounded thing. Sometimes the puzzle is just figuring out what all the pages of a website are, or finding that one hidden link. There have been some really great technical puzzles requiring a team of brave Unfictioneers writing shell scripts for days to unravel them, but they do not all have to be. Anything requiring a leap of logic or some insight based on discrete input is, in my mind, a puzzle.

Then again, that may be why people doing my puzzle trail wanted to kill me. ;)

[MageSteff]

As a player who is not very good at puzzles, I would suggest that the puzzles have some sort of meaning within the game, and not just tossed in for people to solve. Puzzles that lead to a series of interlinked pages, puzzles that add to the flavor of the ARG, not just here's a puzzle to keep you busy - because the good puzzle solvers will have most of them finished in less than a minute.