Every puzzle author has a first spark. In this interview, we sit down with Hazelstorm, whose journey began with a chance discovery of a video game and grew into a deep love for puzzle games. They share how playful experimentation turns into carefully crafted Stars and Fields puzzles, what makes a good aha moment, and why creating puzzles can be just as joyful as solving them.
What first pulled you into creating puzzles?
When I was young, I was walking around in the games section of Walmart and noticed a [Nintendo] DS game that looked interesting, so I asked my parents to buy it for me. The game was called "Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box", and it's the first puzzle game I ever played. I was super into the Professor Layton series after that, and I started exploring other puzzle games as well. Later, I joined the Thinky Puzzle Games community on Discord, which is a place to talk about the process of developing and playing so-called "thinky puzzle" games. After observing and sometimes participating in discussions there, I decided I wanted to finally start creating puzzles of my own!
What's the thought processes when crafting a puzzle like Stars and Fields?
The process of crafting any puzzle usually starts with finding some surprising or interesting behavior that arises as a result of the rules. Sometimes that means I already have an idea in my head for a puzzle, but most of the time it means just randomly messing around with different shapes and patterns until I discover something cool. As a puzzle designer, my goal is to share a cool thing I found, by making a puzzle that pushes you towards finding the same thing for yourself. I often achieve that goal by turning the main idea into a "linchpin," a piece of logic or an a-ha moment that you have to realize in order to solve the puzzle logically.
How do you determine the level of a puzzle?
All the puzzle authors use an automatic solver that checks (via brute-force) whether a puzzle has a unique solution and gives an estimate for the difficulty of the puzzle. The difficulty estimate is usually good enough, but sometimes it's way off and I have to account for the difference. Ultimately, by solving lots and lots of puzzles, I have built an intuition for how difficult a puzzle feels that I can use to determine which day it should be featured on.
How do player reactions and comments influence what you create?
I love seeing reactions and comments on things I create! I don't know if I can say they have a direct influence on the contents of those things, but they definitely give me a huge boost in motivation to keep creating.
How do you balance making a puzzle challenging without making it frustrating?
In the context of grid logic puzzles, I find that the biggest difference maker is creating more than one logic path to follow. That way, if you're stuck on one section of a puzzle, you can always look for progress elsewhere. If every step is locked behind the previous one in a sequence, then it becomes a lot more frustrating to look for the single next step. Another technique is repetition, putting the same step or similar steps multiple times in the same puzzle. It's satisfying to make progress in a puzzle and suddenly realize that you can apply the same logic a bunch of times in other places!
What do you like to do when you aren’t creating puzzles?
When I'm not designing puzzles, I like to play puzzle games! Recently I've been playing Toroban, a block-pushing puzzle game where the levels infinitely loop in every direction. I also make my own puzzle games, write music, and play board games.
Coffee, tea, or something else entirely to fuel your day?
Coke Zero or tea!
If you could design a dream puzzle with unlimited time and zero constraints, what would it be?
I would take inspiration from games like Linelith and Öoo to make a short game where discovering new information recontextualizes how you see puzzles so that you can solve them in a new way.
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