Puzzle Game Level Design: Reverse Method--Explaining Puzzle Game Level Design

Foreword

Puzzle games are very interesting, but their level design is not easy, it looks random, and the difficulty should increase in order from easy to difficult, and at the same time, there must be standard prompt solutions. This sectionI would like to share with you a solution to the level design of a type of puzzle game. I call this method: Reverse push method.

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Scenarios adapted to inverse inference

First of all, let's take two classic game examples to see the game scenarios where the inverse method is applicable.First of all, let's look at the level design of "Puzzle Game". When doing level design in "Puzzle Game", you may think that it will be very simple, just divide the picture into several blocks, and then randomly scramble it.finished.So here comes the question:

(1) How to ensure that the difficulty level increases from low to high?

(2) How to ensure that each group of randomly scrambled levels can be solved, and can be restored to the original picture state according to certain steps?

(3) How to solve the puzzle automatically through the computer and realize the process of intelligently prompting the whole puzzle?

Level Solving Smart Tips

Let's look at a classic game case "Hua Rong Road". His main gameplay is to wrap objects with blocks of different shapes, and then let the player remove the blocks, so that there is a direct path between the player and the exit.Come out, there are also intelligent prompts, which can prompt the movement method of each level.The level design here also faces 3 problems:

What is inverse method

When doing level design, we write level editing tools for planners. The so-called reverse method is to generate the initial state of the level through iteration of difficulty levels starting from the results.Solving with the player is the opposite, so it is called reverse method.It mainly includes the following steps:

How to make Huarong Road as a level editor

Next, we will take "Hua Rong Dao" as an example to explain the production of the level editor. According to the first step of the reverse method, we need to generate the results. On the game disk of "Hua Rong Dao", we first generateThe data blocks from the "player block" to the "end point", when these data blocks are used to generate the level map, no other blocks are allowed between this path. Next, we give the user an editable tool to let the level designArrange the building blocks (you can also code to generate blocks) as shown below:

Next, we go through N steps, and each time we use the code to randomly move the blocks that can be moved inside, so that we get N operations and save each operation.At the same time, the result of the level after N operations is obtained. The result of this level is the initial state we present to the player, and the final result of the game is the state displayed by the level editor (it can also be procedurally generated).The saved N iteration steps, in turn, are intelligent solutions.This solves the three problems of level editing mentioned above:

(1) We start from the result and reverse it to ensure that there is a solution;

(2) We use difficulty + times to control the level state obtained after how many iterations, so that the difficulty can be controlled.

(3) We've reversed the steps in the level editor and that's the intellisense.

Well, today's inverse game level design is here. Follow us to learn more skills in level editing.