It’s been a while but DAILY HERD PHOTO

Stephen's Sausage Roll - 10 Years of Sausage (+ physical coin giveaway!) - Steam News A thank you and information about a

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So, if you would like a SSR coin to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Stephen's Sausage Roll, enter your details here - forms.gle/xVqK8XRUL6VN... numbers are limited!

A mobile screenshot of the PNP file of the All Is Bomb cards

Uploaded a new PNP build of the second edition of All Is Bomb. It’s still ugly, but content wise, it’s getting there! Would love some new playtesters - shoot me a DM if you’re interested

10 years of grilling: Stephen's Sausage Roll remains one of the most influential puzzle games ever created · Thinky Games Happy 10th anniversary to Stephen's Sausage Roll! We asked a handful of developers why it remains a puzzle game masterpiece to this day.

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Tape 05 YouTube video by Boards of Canada

Things are a bit better in the world now that new Boards Of Canada music has arrived www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bgh...

With Workworkwork, it's not so much that the additional rule would enable alternate solutions, but that it's part of a pretty obvious question of "what happens if I X?" and that outright disabling X in the early puzzles would be detrimental to the game. So there's a certain need to address it.

It's more about instances where an aspect of the ruleset can't be easily avoided or not mentioned - or where doing so would make the early puzzles unnecessarily rigid and uninspired. Out of my games, Workworkwork is probably the best example because Ch2 mechanics were possible right from the start.

Yeah, like I replied to Peter, Herd as a whole is probably a bad example, since it doesn't really have this central friction of having to point out something shouldn't be done early into the game, while not being strictly forbidden.

Ah yeah, I can see that. Probably even more so if the secret knowledge isn't based on movement tech.

(WWW SPOILER) In the end, I worded it in a way so they understood it would be addressed later, which I feel isn't particularly elegant. A playtesting version existed where I simply didn't address it - and multiple testers messaged me "is this allowed?" or outright solved puzzles incorrectly.

(WWW SPOILER) So I had to basically lead the player to "think" it was forbidden to enter a piece multiple times, but at the same time making them not feel cheated or trolled once they'd encounter the advanced rule.

(WWW SPOILER) Something happens if the path enters a piece more than once. So, entering a piece multiple times isn't forbidden, but it leads to stuff I wanted to explore in later chapters. If I'd want to avoid it just through grid configurations, I'd have to limit the pieces to being 1x1.

(WWW SPOILER) Workworkwork is a puzzle system where you draw a path between two little workers. The path can enter into different pieces on the gird and if it does, it picks up these pieces, potentially chaining them together into larger output pieces.

OK, reading back this Bsky thread, I feel like I stated something obvious and quickly fixable, so I want to focus on Workworkwork even more, since I think it's a perfect example for the type of rule obscuring I want to talk about. Note that the following replies will have spoilers for the game:

Lol :D I think this cursed problem is more bound to instructionless sets of paper puzzles which are usually stateless and more exposed to the "full arsenal" of solving techniques. I think most puzzle genres can avoid it by simple grid limitations.

Also, I *did* use fence blocking for some other advanced thing in Herd haha :D

Yup! It's about the techniques that are inherently easy to achieve or use knowing the full system, but simply aren't needed for the initial puzzles (they'd both cloud the solving space and overwhelm the player)

Yeah, that would be a good solution! :) Herd is probably a bad example to focus on even with silly additions - I think that stateful / movement puzzles are inherently easier to limit in the solving space with clever grid configurations as compared to stateless puzzle.

...imagine there was a (silly) rule that if you slid the Shepherd into the left, you'd jump over the border of the grid. And I wanted to keep this as a secret for a while. How to force the player to avoid sliding into the left? This is the type of "cursed" problems that I don't know how to solve yet

Thank you! :) To be honest, with Herd, the rules introduction wasn't as problematic from the design stand point - I could limit the grid constructions without sacrificing too much puzzle juice and the slow drip of the suspicious elements was something I could control independently. However... (1/2)

For those who played Workworkwork: it was a significant effort to gently disallow Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 mechanics in Chapter 1. If anyone has the book in front of them, you can flip through the pages a bit, checking out my semi-successful attempt :) Always about "shouldn't" and not "can't".

Anyway, just thinking aloud, this is something I've been brainstorming about since I opened up the PLAC file yesterday. I know the obvious answer is to simply design grids and puzzles that avoid the advanced configuration, but by doing this, you sometimes leave real gold on the table. Hm hm.

My attempt to explain the limitation through exclusively visual language of the puzzle format

The advanced rule is that if you cover multiple symbols with a piece, "something" happens. However, I want to first explore the possibilities ignoring this advanced rule - I want to present puzzles where a piece always covers only one symbol. How to communicate this with a gentle "shouldn't"?

A PLAC puzzle showing placing a piece into the grid.

A PLAC puzzle showing how a piece covers a symbol.

An example is PLAC, a game I worked on last year (haven't finished it yet, but might do it someday). In PLAC, you place pieces into the grid and if you cover a symbol, you must place another piece depicted by that symbol, and so on.

So you have to address it somehow. But it's dangerous, as you don't want to bring too much attention to it, screaming "You shouldn't do this now". And it must be "shouldn't", not "can't", which is in itself spoilery and counter-intuitive. I haven't yet found an optimal way to do it.

Of course, you as the designer must make sure that the introductory puzzles can't be solved and cheesed using the advanced rules, but the main problem lies in the solvers themselves, as they are suspicious and they notice there is a blind spot in their understanding of the system.

You want to expose the system to the solver incrementaly, step by step, and by showing them the simpler puzzles first (those ignoring the advanced aspect of ruleset), they can internalise the game better and even more importantly, not bother themselves with looking for the advanced key moves.

Basically, there's an aspect of the ruleset that opens up the solving space quite significantly, leading to advanced puzzling, but if you ignore this aspect and treat it as forbidden territory for a while, you can juice out a bunch of great introductory puzzles.

In puzzle game design, there's sometimes this strange window of puzzle possibilities that relies on the solver not knowing the full rules. This has happened a few times to me already (Workworkwork, Abdec, work-in-progresses) and I haven't yet found a consistent way to address it.