Designer Diary: When Pigs Fly

Hey Puzzle Bomb Family,

It's that time of the month again, where I try to wait until you've all had a chance to do this puzzle for yourselves before I dive into the design process. I hope y'all have been having fun with this one!


The Humble Beginnings

A lot of people ask me where all of my ideas come from, and I always have a hard time explaining it, because they just happen; they usually occur when I'm not even really thinking about puzzles or trying to come up with a design.

For Porcine Ascent, I specifically remember sitting in a coffee shop doing some other work. During the school year, I hang out at this coffee shop (if you're local to the Kansas City metro, make your way down to Gardner to Groundhouse Coffee!) while my kiddos are at their homeschool co-op. I was minding my own business, when this image, colors and all, popped into my head. I pretty much immediately set to work on laying out the design.

For this design, the initial layout work made sense to do digitally, as the three types of elements (pigs, clouds, and mountains/trees) required a lot of scooching around to both create visual balance while also making for a working puzzle.

For example, if you look at the pigs, you'll notice they're often strategically placed where their tails or feet can grab adjacent pieces. In a puzzle like this, it's also tricky to avoid placements that will result in pieces that are too fragile or small. Balancing this with an aesthetically pleasing arrangement took many hours!


The Thematic Linework is Finalized

I then took my digital layout and traced it out on my trusty light table. I usually don't bother scanning in this step and coloring it, but I wanted to make sure I liked my idea for the sky color. I had to avoid the obvious blue as my heart was set on pink and blue pigs, so my plan was to darken the wood so that the clouds could contrast a bit.

As for the shape forms in the puzzle, given the subject matter, I wanted to keep everything a bit cartoony rather than realistic. It's fun what a simple shape can suggest, and I really dug the idea of elongated triangles for both the mountains and the trees, with color being the only differentiator between the two. And that pink "tree"? It just seemed necessary.  :D

If you've been doing my puzzles for long, you'll also know that one of my favorite visual tricks is having design elements jut out of the edge, assuming there's a defined edge. Having the clouds and pigs poke out of those edges adds a lot of visual interest vs. a scene that's framed all around.


Puzzlification!

So far, this was still merely a piece of art waiting to be puzzlified. It was time to begin that process!

For thematic puzzles, what type of connectors to use is a decision in itself, as I love when the connectors feel like an integral part of the puzzles theme or personality, rather than just an afterthought. Here, it felt appropriate to go with a random, cartoony connector style, so I set off to work on breaking this puzzle up.


You can see that I left the pieces fairly chunky in this one vs. the tightly packed linework I often do. This just felt right given the similarly chunky pigs, and the loose, goofy-looking cut lines.

The trees and mountains also left a lot of straight edges that needed connection points. It's always a decision whether to try to hide these type of connections or to accentuate them. Given the goofy design, I decided to accentuate them with spade and club connectors. Why spades and clubs? Beats me. I just thought they looked fun, and they create a nice, tricky, repeating element for the bottom half of the puzzle to complement the repeating elements of pig parts in the top half.

Lots of doodling later, and my sketch was full of funky lines!



In all my sketches, you might notice I'm not after perfection. This is for two reasons:

1) I'm not the world's most skilled artist in terms of physical capability to output a polished hand-drawn design.

2) There's still the step of digitally tracing my sketch for laser cut output. This is where all the kinks get smoothed over, making it not worth the time to create the perfect sketch!

Here's the cut line file one my hand-drawn work is digitally traced and refined:




Bringing Home the Bacon

From there, my color file and cut line files went out to my production partner for sampling, and back came this beautiful, whimsical, and wacky puzzle.




A Note on Release Order

One thing I don't talk about often is decisions about which puzzles to offer when. I design over a year in advance (I currently have all of the puzzles designed through February of 2028, Lord willing), which means I have a pretty large pool of finalized puzzles.

Given this large pool, I sometimes massage the release order. In this case, I thought it was important to follow up last month's incredibly difficult puzzle with something much less meticulous and demanding. Haybound Needle almost felt like a brain teaser, whereas this is much more firmly in the "just plain fun puzzle" category.

I make these decisions across all kinds of factors. I try to not offer similar subject matter, cut styles, etc, in back-to-back months, ensuring that you get a very different experience from month to month. It's fun to surprise you and keep you on your toes!

I hope you have a wonderful rest of your July, and am already excited for what I can show you in August!

Love and blessings,
Chad, the Puzzle Bomb artist-and-other-stuff guy