We sit down with Jeffery Bardon to talk about his journey from avid puzzle solver to thoughtful puzzle creator.
For this puzzle creator, making puzzles has always been as rewarding as solving them. What started as a curiosity to recreate and remix favorite games grew into a thoughtful approach to designing Stars and Fields puzzles.
What first pulled you into creating puzzles?
Solving puzzles! For as long as I can remember, after playing something new I would want to make some levels for it, both for puzzles and other games. Creating something new let me explore threads that the sources didn't or couldn't, and also gave me a better appreciation for what goes into the creative process in the first place.
What's the thought processes when crafting a puzzle like Stars and Fields?
For me it's actually quite different between these types. For Stars, I often have a "seed" idea that I then try to use in the puzzle as many times as possible. This could be a specific region shape, a specific kind of elimination, a specific flow to the puzzle, and so on. For Fields, I tend to start from a clue layout or singular specific thing I want to force to happen, and then build the rest of the puzzle around interesting properties of that start. There's often a lot of freedom for the final clue values, so when possible I try to do things like "all clues are even" when finishing a puzzle.
How do you test whether a puzzle is solvable before they are published? How do you determine the level of a puzzle?
Testing for validity, solvability and difficulty all go together with the creation process. I make puzzles the same way I solve them, by noting down everything I know must be true from the clues currently in the puzzle, and repeat that process until I have a working puzzle, backtracking and adjusting if necessary. Assuming I didn't make any mistakes, I then have a valid puzzle that I know requires no steps harder than the hardest step I used when creating it. Sometimes finishing the puzzle will result in easier ways through, or sometimes I underestimate the difficulty of a step I've been staring at for a while, so a while after the initial creation I'll re-solve the puzzle from scratch and verify the validity and set the final difficulty then.
How do player reactions and comments influence what you create?
The biggest impact player feedback has had on my puzzle creation process has been learning what kinds of steps are actually beginner friendly, and what steps that have become second nature to me over the years are actually quite difficult to spot. Without this feedback, I'd be making too many hard puzzles!
How do you balance making a puzzle challenging without making it frustrating?
I try to signpost the key steps or bottlenecks in some way, and have each step build on the information gained from the previous step, while also having that next step only be possible with that information. Having to find a lot of bits of progress to "break in" can be frustrating because it requires finding all of those separate parts to progress.
For easy puzzles the opposite is true, where I tend to want any progress to lead to more progress, so having multiple places to start helps reduce frustration. As long as a solver doesn't need to find every possible start in order to make it to the end, of course.
Do you have a signature puzzle “quirk” or hallmark that fans should look for?
For Stars, I tend to avoid 4 way intersections of region borders.
What do you like to do when you aren’t creating puzzles?
I'm always solving puzzles on my own time, both for fun and in competitions. You never know where inspiration might strike from! Outside of puzzles, I enjoy Touhou - going for lunatic no bomb clears recently - and speedrunning, especially the process of routing.
Coffee, tea, or something else entirely to fuel your day?
I don't do caffeinated beverages, but I won't say no to good quality chocolate.
If you could design a dream puzzle with unlimited time and zero constraints, what would it be?
Anything that gets out there and gets people who didn't think they'd be interested in puzzles to give them a real shot. I find a lot of people find puzzles intimidating and don't try, and once they do, they find everything more accessible and enjoyable than expected. In a way, I've gotten to work on this project a few different times, including here!
.png)
