[DISC] Why is the intended solution so important?

[WillLem]

I'm interested to get as many people's thoughts on this as possible.

Should levels only be solved by their intended solution? Should all other solutions be backroute-fixed, patched-out, or at most grudgingly accepted?

Or, can alternatives be happily accepted, but only if they're better than what's intended? Or even, should alternatives always be happily accepted because the player has found a different way to beat your level with the skills and situation that you've provided?

So then, should alternatives be outright encouraged, providing a skillset which enables multiple possible solutions, all of which are intended either by design or in spirit? This can be quite difficult to get right without making a level trivial.

On a wild note, should backroutes be encouraged? Or, is this just another way of saying "alternate solutions" in the event that the designer hasn't felt the need to prevent anything other than the intended solution?

I suppose what I'm really asking here is what's in the title: Why is the intended solution so important? It seems to me that there are so many other possible scenarios by which both designer and player can be satisfied, so what's the deal with packs which exclusively provide "do-this-only-as-intended" levels?



Maybe here's what's happening.

A scenario which comes up many times is that a designer will create a level, and a player will find a way to solve it with a solution which isn't intended. In that scenario, the player has "beat" the designer.

The designer must then take their level back to the drawing board and find a way to fix it so that only their intended solution is possible. We've all been there!

It gets beaten again, by another overlooked backroute. The level must be revised again. And again. And AGAIN! Until finally, in version 27.4, the level cannot be beaten by any solution other than the intended one.

But now, the player cannot solve the level. They don't know the obscure trick or they can't quite piece together the extensively complex series of actions which must be done in just the right order. Finally, the designer has "beat" the player.

But, neither of these situations is really what anybody wants. The player doesn't want a level they can't solve and the designer doesn't want their level to remain unsolved (not forever, anyway).

So, ideally, the player manages to figure out the intended solution, and at that point they have "matched" the designer. Nobody has "beaten" anybody: the player can own the fact that they figured out the solution, and at the same time the designer can be proud that their challenge worked as intended.

Maybe it's this then: if a level is solved by the solution intended, there are no winners and no losers. Everbody comes out on an even playing field, where wisdom and knowledge prevail.

Thoughts?

[NieSch]

Yeah, there's limitations to fixating too much on one perfect intended solution, like you pointed out already. And a level with a clever intended solution  being backrouted by a much simpler one is no fun either, for both player and designer. So somewhere between that lies room for fixing backroutes and forcing a (more) intended solution.

[Proxima]

As well as this community, I've been part of other puzzle game communities (primarily Repton and DROD) for many years. The same discussion comes up in all of them. That said, what follows is just my opinion -- I don't pretend that having had this discussion before has given me any kind of "definitive" answer.

Or, can alternatives be happily accepted, but only if they're better than what's intended? Or even, should alternatives always be happily accepted because the player has found a different way to beat your level with the skills and situation that you've provided?

I don't think there can be an "always", because what's best depends on the level and depends on what the designer wants for that level. Allowing alternative solutions makes a level easier -- sometimes drastically easier. Of course, it's good for the community as a whole if a range of difficulties are represented. It's usually good for packs to cover a range of difficulties as well, although I have a lot of respect for packs that start hard and stay hard (or get harder) if the designer can pull it off.

So, sometimes "alternative solutions are okay and I'll just sort this level into an easier rank" is the right choice -- obviously for an aesthetic value of "right", since designing level packs is not a moral decision. Sometimes the level works best as completely open-ended or 20-of-all. Sometimes you can split it into easier and harder repeats. And sometimes, you have the level that you really want to keep as one of your harder levels and it's worth defending the intended solution and cutting out backroutes. It depends on a lot of factors: how elegant the intended solution is, how much easier the alternative is, whether the alternative is elegant as well, whether the alternative is enabled by a simple oversight or complex logic... and at the end of the day, simply the designer's personal preference.

I'll give a few examples.

"Let's go camping" (Genesis Sunsoft 19 / Redux Lunatic 27) is completely spoiled by the backroute of turning round all three lemmings on the top level with just a digger and builder. This solution isn't interesting at all; it just repeats actions you've had to do many times before as components of other levels, and it's very easy to spot, so there's little time spent engaging with the puzzle and little satisfaction from beating it. The Redux version, which prevents this backroute, is a much better (more interesting, more enjoyable) level. Even so, it doesn't enforce one specific solution; it just enforces the general route of using the full level area, leaving the specifics up to the player.

"Postcard from Lemmingland" (Tricky 19 / Redux Zany 19) is a case where the unintended solution is quite a bit harder, both to find and to execute. This makes it perfect for a talisman -- both solutions are still possible, but if you find the intended solution first, you can keep looking for the harder solution.

"Five Alive" (Wicked 16) is, in NeoLemmix, completely spoiled by the backroute of using the bomber exactly at the terrain-steel boundary to turn the lemmings around. This is why it didn't make it into Redux; we couldn't find any good way of fixing the level, and the level with the backroute wasn't interesting enough to be worth keeping, even in a lower rank.

"You only get one bash at it" (Lix Hopeless 38) is a level built around a particular idea: not just a theme, but one specific thing that I wanted the player to do, and the level hides the fact that this action will solve it and has red herrings encouraging the player to look elsewhere. If you don't have this one idea, you haven't solved the level. So I felt I had to cut out unintended solutions, even to the point of requiring 49/50 saved rather than the original 48/50.

"The Hotel in Hell" (Lix Hopeless 6) is a case where, each time Simon found an unintended solution, I decided it was worth preventing it. There isn't really a single core trick or linchpin to the intended solution, but it has a coherence as a whole. You have to work out which lemmings to send where in order to construct parts of the route, and the right order to do things in to make everything possible and not lose more than you're allowed. I felt it was a better level for making sure that only the intended solution is possible, but that's a judgement call and someone else (if they had built the level) might have decided differently.

(I could go on with other examples of levels where I've accepted backroutes and levels where I've prevented them, but you get the idea.)

A scenario which comes up many times is that a designer will create a level, and a player will find a way to solve it with a solution which isn't intended. In that scenario, the player has "beat" the designer.

But now, the player cannot solve the level. They don't know the obscure trick or they can't quite piece together the extensively complex series of actions which must be done in just the right order. Finally, the designer has "beat" the player.

But, neither of these situations is really what anybody wants.

Firstly, there's no such thing as a level a player can't solve because they don't know the obscure trick. If it's possible for the creator to come up with the trick, then it's possible for the player to discover.

More generally, it's not really possible for a level to "beat" the player in this sense. If the player can't solve it, they can always come back another time and try again. However, most players will have some levels they never solve, because we have limited time and solving levels is only a hobby. And that's okay!

So, rather than thinking in terms of either the player or the designer "beating" each other, I suggest thinking of the designer as a provider of entertainment. If the player gets enjoyment out of solving the level -- whether by the intended solution or by a backroute -- that's great; but fixing backroutes may improve the product and make it more enjoyable for the next player to come along.

[kieranmillar]

It's not about some sort of weird mental combat in intelligence between the designer and the player. As someone who almost exclusively designs the type of level I think you're referring to, let me explain my thought processes.

For me when designing levels, an approach that really never works out for me is putting down a load of nice looking terrain then setting skills to make a level out of it. My brain just isn't wired that way. Instead, I like to come up first with a central premise based on game mechanics then try to design in favor of making that work. I see each of my levels having a central premise that I design the level around, something that I think makes it different and stand-out from the rest of the levels. Maybe it's an interaction between two skills, or some sort of larger "story" about the experience of the level. This tends to result in more puzzley levels by the nature of the approach, but that's fine by me. There's enough user packs out there with different types of level, I figure it's best to stick to a certain experience enjoyed by a certain type of player and if someone is looking for one of the other experiences, someone else had made a pack more suitable for them.

Let me give you an example of the top of my head. The story / premise for the level might be "You have to place a blocker early on, but then you need to free it later. However freeing it requires you to commit to using a destructive skill there and that then causes another problem which you need to deal with". In this hypothetical level, maybe you solve this conundrum by taking a non-obvious approach through a path somewhere else in the level, making use of what looks like scenery but using it instead of the obvious path requires different skills, which frees up the skill you need to solve the original problem. In my head, the experience I'm hoping the player playing will go through will be "Oh this looks straightforward... wait, I need to free the blocker ... wait, mining here causes me another issue, I wish I had a digger.... can I save one somewhere .... hmmm, this path looks inefficient .... ah got it now! Wow, the end result was quite different to what it originally looked like, I see why the level is laid out the way it is now, this is very cool!" And so the player has a great time and a memorable experience. Those kinds of experiences, that's what I'm looking for.

But oh no, problem! Instead of committing to the destructive skill, the player just mines out the blocker and immediately cancels it with a basher, trivializing the level and entirely bypassing the cool experience that I believe they would have enjoyed. Hmmm.... well maybe I can't get away with spare skills, OK, I'll rework this area, simplify the level a bit, add steel here... before you know it, the levels end up having only the bare minimum skills and more focussed around a small thing, and now it's a very small and focussed puzzle level. That's how it goes.

OK, so why be so focussed on having players follow this "intended" experience? Because I believe people will have more fun with it. The levels aren't for everyone, but I've watched streams of people playing my levels and if they get the intended solution the result is almost always the most enjoyable levels in the pack for them. And this isn't really a surprise, I mean, it's the entire reason why I built the levels the way I did. Of course, I don't know if this is always the experience players will have, I can only hope it works out.

I think in the iterative process of fixing up levels, my levels for some packs end up a lot less forgiving in solutions than I originally plan for. I'm actually alright with some amount of diversion as long as the core premise is followed, but usually that's the one thing that gets sidestepped, because of course the whole challenge of the level comes from solving some kind of problem or seeming contradiction and that's the thing people backroute.

[Apjjm]

It is and it isn't. Ultimately when designing the level I usually want the player to have an "aha!" moment, or to feel like they have figured something out or discovered something - whether that's the thing I intended when I made the level or not.

As a solver, something that really takes me out of that experience is when multiple levels fall into what I feel like are an "overcentralised" area of the solutions. To me this is a set of particularly powerful skill interactions that levels (especially harder ones) can tend to gravitate towards that are typically most efficient. If you as the player know these, then a lot of easier levels can just be solved that way too without really engaging with the level. Some of the worst offenders of these are:

• Cancelling a basher or miner to sneak up/through a wall somewhere
• Using a digger on a hill to create an unclimbable wall
• Using some of the more 'obscure' blocker interactions
• Adjusing the RR to reverse a lemming with overlapping builders

As the quote goes "Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game", and I think that when you know about those interactions it can be very hard to not just reach for the same interactions over and over. When designing levels I really try to create variety in the solutions which I need to rule out many of the most powerful interactions to give others room to shine - but this is really hard because alot of these interactions can just be used everywhere. I want each level to really feel different when solving it, which means the ways the skills interact in the level have to be unique. I will be much harder on a backroute to a level if it lets you solve a level in exactly the same way as a previous one, or in a way that I feel makes the level boring.

A last point on this is that I think there is a degree of trust that builds up between the player and designer as they play through the pack. If i've played a pack and reached the hardest levels, I get a feel for how those levels are put together and trust that the designer won't throw some really unfair/unfun solution at me to make the level harder (e.g. find the exact RR or try again after 5 minutes solving again) - this trust lets me instead focus on finding a 'logical path' to the solution. I want my levels to build up trust in that way too - I won't throw every evil trick I have at you in one level. If you get any particularly 'clever' interaction it WILL be the 'aha!' moment of the level, and I won't red-herring you away from it - Instead I'll try and give you every opportunity to find it, and streamline the level to make needing to save that crucial skill something you discover early.

At the end of the day, the level should make the player feel good for solving it.

[Dullstar]

I may be one of the less active designers, but my general rule with it is that I look for the main ideas from the intended solution being there. Many backroutes barely engage with the level at all and are worth patching for that reason alone. Some are interesting in their own right, but they still can steal the spotlight from the intended solution which was also presumably interesting enough to want to showcase in a level, so I think the best approach there is to patch and then recycle the backroute into its own level.

[Zaphod77]

When a backroute should be patched.

1)when the backroute essentially changes the difficulty rating of the level to an easier one.  If your level is taxing, and the backroute is easy, it obviously should be patched.
2)when it removes an intended "aha!" moment that's supposed to stump you until you figure it out.  This should only apply to techniques that are relatively easy when you know how to do them.  Difficult and non obvious techniques shouldn't be used to gatekeep a level solution.

When neither of these two apply, there's little harm in leaving it in.

When the intended solution involved a somewhat obscure, but not difficult mechanic, there should be some sort of clue in the level name, even if players are likely to have worked out the trick before.  The classic example of a name with one is "How do I dig up the way?"