Hey Puzzle Bomb fam,
I hope you'll all been well, with many of you already enjoying Bumfuzzled #28: Prismatic Parasol. Time to dive in to how this puzzle took shape!
The Spark
I've talked about this many times, but my ideas have many different starting points. Some are an image I'd like to execute on, where I then have to decide how to puzzlify, and others are based on a challenge I'd like to present, where I then have to decide on an image to apply it to.
This one is firmly in the first category, where I thought the idea of a rainbow cutting through a stark background made for a super attractive image. In many ways, the "look" makes it a close cousin to Bumfuzzled #18: Skyward Spectrum. It's just a surefire recipe for a stunning visual, with many ways to pull off!
However, a rainbow alone would be pretty boring, so the idea of the rainbow hitting something and dripping off floated to the top of my idea list. But, what can the rainbow drip off from? Y'all know how I love my voids, so an umbrella almost immediately came to mind, and I could envision the striking void it would create below the umbrella.
The first sketch was a pretty simple one...
Puzzlifying the Image
One thing was super clear to me about this design: the rainbow portion was going to be incredibly easy, as it contains relatively few pieces, and colors are so easily sortable.
This meant the large areas to both sides of the rainbow needed to be hard. I also thought it would be comical if of my cutest designs so far, with a colorful rainbow to boot, was one of the hardest Bumfuzzleds so far.
I'd been wanting to try a cut style based on one long, super squiggly line, and this design was just begging for it:
If you look closely, there's a faint, loosely undulating line beneath the tighter, dark squiggles. This faint line was to give myself a basic path to follow as I squiggled my pencil on the blank canvas. As an artist, you often have to come up with tricks to help you draw what you're drawing!
Dialing Everything In
That first crack at the squiggles wasn't as smooth as I wanted, so it was time to refine, decide how to segment the rainbow, and get everything to connect! After a good amount of time at my light table, the linework was finished.
A couple significant details and decisions:
1) As if the squiggle section needed to be more difficult, one fun side effect of taking one huge squiggle, and then dividing it into puzzle pieces is that the entire border is largely non-connective, only connected via the inner pieces. The only border pieces that directly connect are where the long squiggle line starts and ends.
Speaking of dividing the huge squiggle areas into pieces, it gave me a bit of a headache trying to visualize where I needed to draw all the little segmentation lines! That section is busy, or I dare say, biz-zay!
2) The rainbow of course needed connectors to the adjacent squiggle areas, but in this case, I knew the number of connectors would directly affect the difficulty. Since it's tough to find matches between the squiggle shapes, I knew these connection points between the rainbow and squiggles were going to be the obvious starting points.
Since pretty much everything else is difficult:
- A high piece count of 182, missing the Bumfuzzled record by a mere two pieces.
- A border that doesn't directly connect.
- The difficulty of matching squiggles.
... I decided to dial things back a tad with 15 connection points (assuming I just counted correctly!). I think this kept the puzzle challenging without such a huge momentum drop when you pivot from the rainbow to the squiggles. For those who might be a bit intimidated by that section, all these starting points provide the encouragement needed to forge on!
Side Note on Replayability
I just mentioned how the expected flow of this puzzle is to do the rainbow first, and then the squiggles, as most folks are going to start with whatever is easiest or most obvious. I generally design with some sort of solve strategy in mind.
However, I've heard from several fans over the years that redo their Bumfuzzleds, but applying a new rule to every redo for a new experience. For example, with Prismatic Parasol, if you really want to challenge yourself and have a different experience, you could make a personal rule to do all the squiggles first, and then the rainbow!
The Final Result
I love the visual appeal of this, and when I sat down to play the puzzle for the first time (I personally assemble every puzzle, both because it's fun, and to make sure I didn't accidentally make a puzzle too easy or difficult), I equally loved the play experience with its wildly contrasting sections: the easy-breezy rainbow and the deviously difficult squiggles.
I hope you all enjoy it as much as I enjoyed creating it for you! Happy puzzling!
Blessings,
Chad aka the Puzzle Bomb Designer Guy
3 comments
Yeah, this one was haaaard. I definitely saw it as Skyward Spectrums difficult cousin. It’s really fun seeing how the interior is a single line – I’ll need to pay more attention to that next time and see if I can trace it!
The idea of different solve experiences/rules is such a fun one. I have tried in frame, frameless, and upside down which I think can all really change your strategy. Something like putting a whole section aside until the end is fascinating. Imagine doing hexagonal landscape leaving the hexagon until last or… horrors… chromacular meander without its meandering chroma (that might be going too far!!)
I enjoyed this one a lot. Honestly when I first saw it I was like "why no grass, or a tree, or sunshine in a top corner?… it seemed like a lot of plain wood, and of course I like the colors! But it was not so hard as one imagines because with the rainbow lines it’s like there’s a lot more edges than one thinks to keep you going. I don’t usually start with edges, but with this puzzle it helped to figure out where those were and then fill in the rest. If I had to say which of your many puzzles was the hardest for me, it’s definitely #12, Vertex Ruse, and then #19, Cartographic Divide. Both of those I ended up just building them on the board and actually using the board to figure out the pieces. Both I felt would need days of attention and I wasn’t up for that much. Every other one I’ve put together without looking at anything for clues, as I prefer to do, but those two… they definitely beat me in the short run! I have all your puzzles, except, sadly, I never bought the ice cream cone metal one, but I have all the others in my collection and I really enjoy seeing what you come up with as you’re so creative in your designs. :) Thanks and keep up the good work! :D You’re an asset to the creative puzzling community. <3
Loved this puzzle, and yes, it was super hard. The non-connecting edges took me by surprise.