Designer Diary: An Accidental Pile of Hay

Hey Puzzle Bomb Family,

As is my custom during a puzzle's final week or so in the spotlight, now that most subscribers have had a chance to at least see, and hopefully play with, the puzzle, it's time to dive into the creation of Haybound Needle!

Mechanism First

As I talked about in my prior blog post, one way puzzle designs can begin is with a particular mechanism I'd like to experiment with. The idea behind this puzzle was connections via "sticks" that jut out at various lengths and angles, with the various stick angles forming the interlocking structure.

At this point, I thought the puzzle would be entirely abstract and themeless, but more on that later!

The Initial Layout

One of my design tricks where I have a certain connector style in mind is starting with a layout of "cells" that will eventually become pieces with connectors. 34 Keys is another good example, where I knew the connectors would be key parts. This ensures a certain piece count and reasonable range of piece sizes before I worry about the detail of connectors.

I typically do everything by hand. However, in this case, since this process was very mathematical/geometric rather than creative/art, I thought it would be a fun diversion to prompt ChatGPT to output me a field of cells based on certain parameters (desired number of cells, % variance in piece size, etc). It decided a "Voronoi Diagram" was best suited for this task. No idea what that is!

It probably took as long to get it to output a good result as if I'd just sat down and drew lines, but I do think it was better at being random than I could have been! I just had to clean up the edge pieces, as it left them oddly large and undefined.

Here was the "puzzle" at this point:

I knew this cut style would result in a high difficulty level, hence the request for 90 pieces, rather than my usual 100+ target.

Adding the Connectors, and an Accidental Theme

While I often touch up my sketches digitally as a final step, the abundance uniform-thickness straight lines meant it made far more sense to do digitally.

In many ways, this was the most uncreative-feeling process of any of my puzzles. The creativity was more in the initial idea/concept, whereas the execution was a pretty routine process of copy/pasting sticks, and arranging them at various lengths/angles to nicely fill each cell and create connections between the cells.

At about the half-way point of tediously placing sticks, I noticed it was looking a lot like a bunch of hay/straw, and an idea came:



This small idea really put a cherry on top of this design, as it's a fairly monotonous solve. It both created a nice theme, rather than it being purely abstract, and also provided a nice a-ha moment when the location of the "needle" is discovered. Many have reported that moment as being a nice endorphin rush!

I kept plucking away until all the connectors were situated:



I mentioned this part of the design was pretty routine, but it wasn't without thought. I took great care to offer a wide variety of angles, lengths, and couplets of sticks (creating V-shapes) rather than making them all individual. These all aid in the solvability of a difficult puzzle.

On the flip side, I did ensure some of the sticks went between adjacent pieces, adding back a bit of trickery. In the unfinished area of the half-way progress image, you can see I had pre-laid those out before proceeding with the connectors. If you like making your eyes bleed, you can find more examples of them in the finished area of the image!

Final Refinement

Early on in the layout, I decided I didn't like all of the sharp angles, and knew I would come back to round off every intersection. Another tedious, but necessary task to improve the puzzle visually.

The Final Result

A bit of color to make the needle stand out and to add nice visual texture to the hay, and voila, the final accidental needle-in-a-haystack look is pulled together!

The Most Divisive Bumfuzzled Yet?

More than any other Bumfuzzled so far, this one has received a love it/hate it response. I knew this idea was a bit of a risk due to the high difficulty, whereas the emphasis for Bumfuzzled has never been on presenting an extreme challenge, but rather a relaxing, artful experience.

This month has also had the highest attrition rate of Bumfuzzled subscribers by a wide margin, and I fear I might have scared off some newer folks with this one, giving them the wrong idea of what a typical Bumfuzzled is like. This had led me to create a "WARNING" sticker to apply to future releases that I deem a chart-topping level of difficulty (hint: there's one harder than this one coming later this year, interspersed with some more releases that are in the usual difficulty range), warning of the high level of difficulty, and assuring that most future releases will be much easier!

But, overall, it seems like most of you enjoy the variety, and not knowing what next month will bring. I also still stick to my design adage of "make what I want to make", knowing that every puzzle is going to be liked/not liked as much by a subset of folks.

What surprise will next month bring? You'll soon find out!

Blessings,
Chad aka the Puzzle Bomb Designer and Other Stuff Guy