Designing a Tactile Puzzle Experience
Project Overview
Rebel is a solo passion project exploring how simple physical gestures can inspire engaging digital gameplay. This game challenges players to flip all the fingers of a hand either up or down through strategic moves, combining tactile familiarity with puzzle complexity.
Role: Game Designer
Timeline: 2 weeks
Tools: Figma
Goal: To explore an idea in game design involving strategy and delight.
The Challenge
Casual mobile puzzle games often struggle to balance simplicity, novelty, and long-term engagement. Players enjoy unique mechanics but can quickly lose interest over time.
This led me to the challenge of creating a game that was engaging, felt familiar, and provided strategic thinking with moments of emotional delight.
Research
Competitive Analysis
I began by looking for similar games to draw inspiration from and benchmark existing solutions. I discovered 'Lights Off'– a game involving a grid of lights to turn on or off, and 'Akari' which also involves a grid but with different rules for lighting up squares
Lights Off
Core Mechanics
Toggle lights to flip neighbouring lights.
Complexity
Simple mechanics growing harder with each stage.
Strengths
Instant feedback and intuitive controls.
Weaknesses
Becomes repetitive over time.
Akari
Core Mechanics
Place lights to illuminate grid.
Complexity
Higher complexity and strategy to complete puzzle.
Strengths
Depth and strategic challenge.
Weaknesses
Overwhelming for beginners.
These comparisons revealed an opportunity for a game that combines intuitive controls with varied challenges to sustain engagement, while avoiding excessive complexity for new players.
Design
Game Mechanics & Delights
Building off initial discoveries, I designed a set of mechanics and game delights that complemented the aesthetics of real hands and mirrored common features of puzzle games. My focus was centred on novelty and elements that could create a variety of unique levels. For each mechanic and delight, I considered the player's motivation and emotional impact.
Mechanics
Flip fingers up or down to achieve the required hand position. When a finger is flipped, adjacent fingers also flip.
- Motivation: Completion of puzzle through core mechanic.
- Emotional Impact: Satisfaction, clarity.
More fingers increase the complexity of the puzzle, however there would be a limit to the amount to avoid unimaginative dynamism.
- Motivation: Adaptive problem-solving.
- Emotional Impact: Challenge, accomplishment.
Frozen fingers can't move until adjacent fingers are flipped once first. This increases the amount of moves needed to solve a puzzle.
- Motivation: Increased challenge and strategy.
- Emotional Impact: Surprise, novelty.
Solve the puzzle within a certain amount of time or moves. This forces the player to act quicker and more carefully.
- Motivation: Challenge through urgency and limitation.
- Emotional Impact: Excitement, tension.
Delights
Hand animations for popular gestures and win/lose states. Think a thumbs up, or a peace sign that
- Motivation: Visual feedback and personality.
- Emotional Impact: Delight, humour.
Change the look of a player hand with unlocked rewards.
- Motivation: Personalisation and progression.
- Emotional Impact: Ownership, pride.
Themed backgrounds and reactive environments.
- Motivation: Thematic variation across levels
- Emotional Impact: Curiosity, immersion.
Thematic music and responsive audio feedback.
- Motivation: Audio reinforcement of actions and success.
- Emotional Impact: Reward, emotional resonance.
I believe using a variety of these mechanics will create enough unique and challenging levels to keep players engaged, while the game delights will provide enjoyment and satisfaction during and after gameplay.
Game modes
Drawing from common structures of similar puzzles I decided to create two modes of play; Adventure and Challenges.
In the adventure mode, players travel through different lands, solving puzzles to defeat various hand factions. There would be an ongoing story and player protagonist that is featured throughout this mode. Challenges would be single levels that players complete in order to move on to the next level.
All levels would have a 3-star completion requirement that ensures players complete them in the least amount of time or moves to receive the highest score.
Adventure mode design example
Challenge mode design example
With the mechanics and aesthetics in place, I adopted an Object-Oriented UX (OOUX) approach to identify the key objects within the system and further develop the game.
ORCA Sprint
Over a few hours, I went through the objects (O), relationships (R), calls-to-action (C) and object attributes (A) figuring out all I could about my intended system.
I knew this step was essential in Rebel's development because by focusing on the core objects and their relationships, I can ensure that the game’s navigation and system logic is intuitive and scalable.
In the first half of the sprint, I was able to create a clear and justified structure for each object and understand how players would navigate within the game.
OOUX helped me to organise my objects and identify the essential elements needed for the game, and understand what the next phases of development could look like.
In the next half of the ORCA process, I focused on visualising the first phase of development and represented the objects through cards and screens, creating low and mid-fidelity wireframes.
NExt Steps
My next steps for this case study would be to develop high-fidelity designs and animations, with a strong visual identity. I'd also create a playable prototype to test and validate the mechanics and UI. I then would prepare a pitch deck for potential development partners or explore low/no-code platforms to bring this to life myself.
