I'm ready to enter my puzzle phase now.

9 June, 2026

I recently participated in two game jams, yielding Ministry of Order and Natural Machines, Inc.. I also released an abstract strategy game called Morris 2. After this flurry of releases, I'm left pondering what my next project should be.

Through these experiences, I've come to understand that certain games are significantly more predisposed for design and development by a single individual. Abstractly, I believe it comes down to how much effort is required to create playtime. I think of it like a formula that results in an effort coefficient we can just call C:

Coefficient = Genre * Art Style * Familiarity

The way the effort coefficient works is simple: when C is 1, 1 unit of work yields 1 unit of playtime. If it's lower, you need to put in more work than the player will spend playing it; when it's higher, the player will actual spend more time than you spent making the content. I imagine this is rare, but not impossible if you allow C to ignore the cost of creating and maintaining the systems that facilitate such rapid content creation. To summarize, C is describing how well your time scales with creating the game.

As an example, consider Baldur's Gate 3. You might spent T time on assets and writing, but these will be likely experienced just once, in significantly less than T time. The effort coefficient C is very small, on the order of 0.001. On the flip side, consider Baba Is You. You can probably whip up a puzzle every hour, and players will spend a few minutes to an hour figuring it out. Now C is insanely high, probably between 0.1 and 1.0.

But why is the coefficient lower or higher for a particular developer and their game? I believe it comes down to the factors in the formula: genre, art, and familiarity.

Genre in particular seems to be the most impactful factor. Role-playing games, adventure games, and story-driven games are the worst offenders - they feature naturally single-use content, so C is always low. (I'm sure AI-generated content can keep C high, but fuck those games: art is for humans.)

Meanwhile, there's the curious case of puzzle games. Once you have a puzzle system and a level editor, it's just making and shipping puzzles. When I wrote Natural Machines, Inc., I spent 3 days on game design, art design, implementation, and the level editor. Then I made all 50 puzzles in about 3 hours. Actual gameplay time is probably about half an hour, or perhaps an hour. We're talking about a C that is well over 0.1.

Aside from genre, art style also greatly affects the coefficient. Even if you have a puzzle game, if it's in Unreal Engine with photorealistic graphics, your technical asset pipeline is likely going to sink C hard. Text-based games, ASCII games, pixel art, vector graphics - this is where C remains largely unaffected by the art style.

It would be negligent to mention that, ultimately, a single developer has more or less familiarity with certain types of games. This is the final factor of C. Sometimes, you're actually better off playing the shit out of a game in your target genre than struggling through a game design document or prototype. It's so much easier to design a game when you've already internalized what makes it fun and which part makes you tick.

My hypothesis is that picking projects with high C is what makes or breaks indie game development efforts. Optimize your ability to make or acquire art, then play games broadly and deeply. This will let C approach your chosen genre's constant. If the genre has naturally low C, it'll be particularly important to have a fantastic art pipeline and intense familiarity with the genre. I won't tell you not to make role-playing games!

Anyway, I'm ready to enter my puzzle phase now. I didn't realize they were so fun, not just to play but also to design and implement. It's almost as if all manners of interfacing with the puzzle system are enjoyable. More importantly, I have this feeling that with such a high C, I can make a vast game in a short period of time.