Let's refresh the knowledge from the previous post. At any point in the game, the players choose between different actions. They choose the option that promises the most beneficial and likely consequences, provided that we have conveyed both the benefit and the likelihood of those consequences to them.

The Cost of Solving Puzzle

However, options for choice aren't always presented on a silver platter. Imagine a crowd of zombies in front of the player. There's no way through. According to the game's design, the player should navigate around them using the rooftops, but the player needs to come up with this course of action themselves. Searching for any option requires resources. ****The resourses spent for searching the right option is the cost of solving puzzle. ****

<aside> 💡 Sometimes, finding the solution to a puzzle is not a sufficient reward. And if the reward doesn't justify the cost of searching for the solution, then the player stops looking for a solution. This means that the puzzle has become too difficult.

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The player won't search long and hard for an option unless the game promises a sufficient reward in order to recoup the cost - for example, the wearable. The expected reward should be worth the effort required to find the option. Also we can make it require less effort to find the option. This way it will be easier to recoup the cost of solving puzzle ****and we will not overdo with puzzles.

Practical Tips

Let’s try reduce the cost of finding an option. To do that you can leave "subtle" hints or draw attention to the right things.

• For example, you can paint the ladder to the roof green when the buildings around it are sand-colored. The key is to use a color that contrasts with the overall background. You can directly analyze the area for the predominant color and choose the opposite on the color wheel.

                          The color wheel

• Make the necessary item larger, more prominent, etc.
• Place the item near a lamppost and make the light from the lamppost flicker a bit, like it's malfunctioning.
• Narrow the search area.
• Make the search process itself enjoyable - add jokes, Easter eggs. This contributes to the weight of the reward. Plus, immediate rewards are more effective than delayed ones. The longer the reward is delayed, the less motivating it becomes (that's why it's so hard to think about retirement at 20).

There's probably no one-size-fits-all recipe. Anything that makes finding an option cheaper than the expected reward, in terms of resources, will work.

Nuances

• At any moment, a player might conclude: “There's no way to bypass the zombies, and the game is impassable.” At that point, it doesn't matter what reward we offer. So, it's useful to first convince the player that there is definitely a way out (find a way to show our "solved Rubik's Cube," for example, by showing top players who have completed the game).
• Perhaps, for hardcore gamers, the reward is solving an unsolvable problem. In that case, the mathematician Perelman is a hardcore gamer in mathematics, who is best known for solving the Poincaré conjecture.

Other posts:

How the players make decisions

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How to block the audience from the stage (+downloadable script)

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