Pouring Water

Designing this type of puzzle is actually fairly simple once you have developed a proper work flow. As with any type of game puzzle, there are many ways of designing the puzzles. The method I am using is probably best referred to as the planned path method. This method breaks the design into 3 phases.

The first phase of design is simply the creation of the winning path. As I said in the first section, there may be more than one solution to this type of puzzle, the path we are working out is just the path that the designer expects the player to take. Depending on how the designer proceeds in the third phase of the puzzle design will determine if the path is in fact the optimal path for completing the game. The path that the player has to follow to reach the end of the puzzle will partially determine the difficulty of the puzzle. Essentially the more twists and turns in the path, the more difficult the puzzle will be to solve. Also remember the rules set forth for the game. The player follows the flow of the water, so you can not have areas that cross over each other (other variations of this puzzle, however, may not have this limitation).

Once the optimal path has been worked out, the next phase allows you to tweak the difficulty of the puzzle by some extent. This is where the way-points are placed. These are the points where the player stops moving with the flow and is now able to change the direction they wish to travel in. The first time I made this type of puzzle, the way-points were all on the corners of the puzzle making a solution a bit easier to find. By having way-points in the middle of a curving path, one is able to make it harder for the player to figure out what the proper path is. Likewise, the number of way-points determines the number of possible wrong moves the player could choose therefore increasing the difficulty.

The final phase is filling the rest of the map. This can be done by adding a bunch of new way-points to the map and then working out paths leading to these alternative points. The key here is to make sure that each alternative way-point either has a path that will lead back to the solution (preferably an earlier point in the main path, though if you don't care if an easier path is present then having an alternative node lead to a latter point on the map is fine). That path does not need to be a direct path to the main route, but in fact can be another way-point that has a path to another way-point that has a path to the main route. Once the map is filled, you are done.