Designer Diary - Bumfuzzled #11 - Abyssal Absorption

Hello puzzle friends,

Over at my full-time job at BoardGameGeek, we often post Designer Diaries of how a board game designer came to design a hit board game. I figured this might also be fun when it comes to puzzle design, as there are a lot of design decisions I factor into each puzzle I design. So without further adieu, here's how Abyssal Absorption came to be!



Beginning the Design

I typically begin a puzzle design in one (or more likely, some combination) of several ways:

1) An illustrative puzzle, where I'm taking a subject matter and puzzlifying it. Bumfuzzled #5 (Dashing Locks) and Bumfuzzled #7 (Aerostat Eve) are good examples of this.

2) A certain piece shape or way of connecting pieces I'd like to experiment with. Bumfuzzled #2 (Greenwood Burg) is a good example, as it started with the idea of very thin, wild piece shapes. In Bumfuzzled #10 (Chromacular Meander), I was experimenting with non-distinct connectors, with color being the main clue. Bumfuzzled #8 (Epochal Interlinks) was largely experimenting with tons of voids.

3) Doodling and seeing what happens. Bumfuzzled #1 (Engimatic Gewgaw) was a flat-out doodle. Bumfuzzled #6 (Bucolic Mechaniverse) was also very doodly, but also a bit illustrative.

Abyssal Absorption started as design path #2, where I started with an idea of a piece shape/cut pattern I wanted to pull off. The idea was to start with a central standard puzzle piece, and as I worked out from the center, the pieces would gradually become less rigid and more fluid.

My problem (or maybe it's a strength?) as an artist is that, often my hands don't pull off the vision of what's in my head. So, as I began sketching, I got to this point rather quickly:

Well, Now What?

Since I'd gone from rigid to pretty darn fluid in the course of 10-ish pieces, and no one wants a 10-ish piece Bumfuzzled, I either needed to start over or call an audible. I kind of liked how this looked, so I called an audible, pivoting to doodle mode since the initial vision was met prematurely. I added some flame-like shapes with curly fingers to expand the design out, which kinda sorta felt like sticking with my initial idea of more flowy shapes as I extended out.

I also like to repeat elements in my designs, which is generally a good design principle and also makes for trickier puzzles, so I brought back hints of that rigid central piece interspersed in the flame-like pieces.

This is a half-way decent first crack, but my design process is usually highly iterative, which means my first pass is sloppy and without concern for proper puzzle connectivity. I'm also old school in that I like pencil and paper, so I end up at my light table, tracing over designs and refining as I go. Here was the next step, sharpening the hard edges, making sure the circular pattern in the center is perfectly circular, and adding connectors. I also edited the "flames" pretty significantly.

As a fan of drop-outs, I also added an outer "ring" that allowed for some drop-outs on the inner side of the ring. You can also see I initially made the ring a bit too narrow.  :D

Notice this sketch is still really sloppy. After I took this scan, I popped it into Photoshop to clean up all the extra lines, and erased lines that still show up in the scan.

Well, Now What (again)?

At this stage, the design was looking good, but the piece count was still too low and didn't yet fit Bumfuzzled puzzle dimensions (a roughy 3:4 aspect ratio). I needed some additions on the top and/or bottom.

Nothing I tried felt right, so I let this design sit for about 4 months before picking it back up; a luxury I have since I typically have an entire years' worth of Bumfuzzled releases already designed and ready to roll! I prefer to design this way, as I find it harder to be creative when I'm under pressure to perform, and prefer for ideas to come naturally with plenty of time to develop. If anything, I have a glut of ideas well beyond what I actually need, so it's easy for me to start on something new, putting partial designs on the shelf for later.

Picking it Back Up!

Eventually, I was looking through my folder of paused and half-forgotten-about designs, and this one caught my eye again. I started playing in Photoshop with adding a cut pattern that kinda sorta appears in the back layer of Party in the Back #3. I thought it might be a nice complement to the existing design, as I also enjoy employing contrasting patterns in my designs. Here was the initial thought:

I liked where this was headed, so I went whole hog on it, adding some oval-ish shapes to it, as I wanted to add an element to the undulating lines that could add additional pops of color to this portion of the design. I also had to edit some of the "flame" tips to better grab onto this puzzle section.


Finishing Up

I then take that vector file and add final colors. I often have an idea of a color scheme out of the gate, but since this design came together as I went, I had no idea for this one. I started playing around with my Puzzle Bomb-brand color palette, and arrived at the final result!


From here, I simply shoot the files to my manufacturer, and a few months later: voila, the production sample that I use for all our photos!