Before reading this guide, I highly suggest reading the two guides on how to create puzzles and puzzlecrafting ettiquite. This guide is not a tutorial on crafting puzzles but instead is for those who have created a few puzzles and want some advice on creating more difficult, perhaps more interesting, puzzles.

One major point needs to be made before I can begin:

Making your puzzles more finnicky does not make your puzzles more difficult. It just makes them more tedious and less fun to solve. You want to avoid forcing your solvers to nudge around your pieces. Sometimes, due to the nature of the game, some nudge is unavoidable. Consider adding a warning if you need a lot of nudge to solve a puzzle. Nobody wants to pixel hunt.

This guide is not about making tedious puzzles. It is about making difficult ones. It is divided into four parts:

1. Avoiding trivial solutions: How can I make sure my answer is interesting?

2. Removing shortcuts: How can I make sure the solver will go my interesting route?

3. Toughening up: How can I disguise my interesting solution?

4. Advanced: What else can I do to make my puzzle difficult?

A trivial solution in Contraption Maker is one where each part has one obvious point to be placed and no thought is required to place the parts. Take a look at the following puzzle, where the goal is "Put the bowling ball into the recycling bin:"


Even though the solver is given five parts, it's a brainless puzzle that takes no time to solve. I consider this a trivial puzzle because it is obvious where the parts go. Part of what makes each part obvious is because one part of each type is used. The electric motor, for example, has to get plugged into the solar panel as it is the only electrical outlet in the puzzle. Similarly, the cat only interacts with the mouse and so it must be placed on the left platform (although the cat could be placed above the bowling ball to force it to move right; see the "Preventing Shortcuts" section).

There are two good ways to prevent trivial puzzles from happening:

1. Use at least two parts of the same category in a puzzle.

2. Use at least one part in an unusual way.

Often a combination of these two approaches is best for a good challenging puzzle.

Multiple parts from the same category

Take a look at a puzzle I published called Belting it Out, where the objective is "Make toast:"


In this puzzle, I give the solver seven belts. The puzzle has seven sources of rotational motion (four hamster cages, two electric motors, and the pinwheel that is given) and seven objects that can have rotational motion (one bob-and-weaver, two jack-in-the-boxes, three conveyer belts, and a generator). Most solvers will then have to think, at least for a moment, about which belt goes where.

The difficulty for puzzles in this category is often determining sequencing. In Belting It Out, the solver has to recognize that the final step requires three rotational motion pieces (delivering the tennis ball, launching the rocket, and moving the rocket) but only starts with one (Tim throwing the ball on the hamster cage). The solver then needs to figure out how to sequence the motion so that multiple sources of rotational motion happen from one initiation.

A good way, then, to think about making a difficult puzzle is to consider using parts from the same category in a sequence, forcing the solver to consider what that sequence must be.

Some of the categories for objects are located in the tabs in the parts bin in Maker Mode. Some objects are in multiple categories. Here are my set of categories of parts:

Moving objects: Anything that when you place it on the screen is immediately affected by gravity. Moving objects include balloons, balls, and buckets but also the candle, the cheese, and the teapot.

Stationary objects: Anything that never moves position but can affect moving objects that hit it. Stationary objects include walls, conveyer belts, and pipes but also the small gear, the hook, and the generator.

Passive objects: Anything that is placed in the background and doesn't affect the motion of the parts placed. Passive objects include the pinwheel, the mouse hole, and the electrical outlet.

Rotational movement sources: Hamster cage, lawn mower motor, electric generator, ratchet clicker, pinwheel.

Rotational movement ends: Gears, conveyer belts, thread bobber, jack-in-the-box, generator.

Rope objects: See the fourth tab with the rope. Importantly, they include balloons, dynamite, and the dog.

Light sources/ends: See the fifth tab with the flashlight. Note that a lit rocket is not a source of light but an exploded blimp is.

Electrical sources/ends: Sixth tab.

Creatures: Seventh tab.

Explosives: Eighth tab.

Wind-generating devices Ninth tab.

Lasers: Tenth tab

Triggered devices: Third-to-last tab

Tim-triggering devices: Second-to-last tab

To sum up this first point, you can make great puzzles simply by using multiple parts from at least one type and using them in sequence. However, when you do so, make sure to arrange them in a way that cannot be shortcutted (see "Preventing Shortcuts" section).


Using Parts in Unsual Ways

One great asset to Contraption Maker is that many of the parts have wide utility, meaning that you can use the parts in unusual ways to make unprecedented contraptions. Take a look at the official Contraption Maker puzzle "Running Tim," which lifts its ideas from Incredible Machine grand finale puzzle "Long Walk:"


(Spoilers ahead)

Normally Tim is transported on the top side of a conveyer belt. In this puzzle, however, you have to lift Tim in the air and transport him on the bottom side of the conveyer belt. This is a perfect example of using parts unusually. Often the best puzzles in the community section do this frequently.

Figuring out unusual ways to use parts probably varies from person to person. I have two strategies. The first is that I play around in Maker Mode with parts that I know have a lot of utility. My favorite part in Contraption Maker is the balloon because it can do a lot of strange things most other parts cannot do. Conveyer belts also have wide use. By playing around with these parts, I can generate new ideas on how the parts can interact. A second approach to generating new ideas is by solving other people's puzzles, but trying hard not to solve the puzzle the way it was intended.

Generating ideas for using parts in unusual ways takes some practice. If you succeed, you'll likely make one of the best puzzles in the game.

So you've made a puzzle that requires unusual part use or interesting sequencing. Before you publish, you need to test your puzzle in Test Mode to make sure that it cannot be shortcutted. Here are some tips to make sure your puzzle doesn't get negative feedback because you either didn't notice a shortcut or could not figure out a way to overcome it. Take a look at this contraption, where the objective is "Pop the balloon." I've provided my intended answer here:


In this example I used multiple of the same parts. Not only that, but I use the hamster wheel slightly unusually: in most puzzles the wheel gets bumped once, but here it is bumped twice. To disguise the solution, I've unlocked the mechanism that triggers the movement of the bowling ball. Here's my puzzle:


I give three belts and there are eight ends (six on the two conveyer belts and the two gears) and one source. Even though my ideal solution isn't hard at all, the multiple parts of the same category should should make the puzzle at least a little bit interesting. But this puzzle has a lot of shortcuts, making the puzzle trivial. The rotational motion needed to pop the balloon could come from the hamster wheel at the bottom but it could also come from one of the gears in the inventory. So all the solver has to do is the following:


The logical step to prevent this shortcut is to confine the balloon to a small enough area such that a second gear cannot be next to the first one:


Now there's no way to put a gear next to the one next to the balloon to cause it to pop easily.

Of course, there's an even more obvious shortcut. A shortcut that shows up very, very frequently in Community Puzzles (and even occasionally in the main game). It is the shortcut of the falling objects. In this puzzle, there's no reason why the bowling ball has to be the object that triggers the bottom left hamster cage. The solver has a tennis ball in their inventory, why not just use that? And indeed, this puzzle merely requires the solver to place the tennis ball above the hamster cage.

Is there a fix for this puzzle such that the tennis ball can still be an unlocked part but it cannot shortcut the puzzle? You may think that it is possible to do so by blocking the top of the hamster cage and isolating the left two ports on the conveyer belt, like so:


I also locked the hamster cage and put a block on top of it to prevent a shortcut where the tennis ball hits the edge of the hamster cage and rolls onto the conveyer belt, essentially delivering itself. Once I do that, I reveal a lot more of my solution to the solver, making my puzzle easier than before. But even this is not sufficent, as there is a simple shortcut:


There's just no getting around that tennis ball in this puzzle. It has to be locked. This rule is widely applicable:

For the vast majority of puzzles you make, all of the moving parts should be locked.

There are some exceptions but you need to be VERY careful. VERY VERY careful! Often I find myself designing a puzzle with the intention to have a moving part unlocked but ultimately locking it in the end because there's simply too much versatility in moving parts.

(The big exception to this rule is when you have so few stationary objects that moving objects too easily fall off the screen instead of performing any useful sort of function. See the grand finale puzzle in Return of the Incredible Machine, "Creation," for an example of how you can invert the rule.)

Now that I've discussed the two major sources of shortcuts, I'll mention some minor ones:

- The small gear, the hook, and the tack are the three most easily shortcuttable items. Especially the small gear. these small objects can frequently be used to redirect motion of a falling object, block laser beams, support things that should otherwise fall, and a lot more.

- Since rope has an infinite length, rope-related puzzles can often be shortcutted. The way around this issue is to NOT give pulleys and consider the directional pull of the rope and organize parts on the screen to allow only one source of that directional pull to occur. Take for example this piece of a puzzle, where the goal is "Blow the whistle:"


While I may desire my solver to use two ropes (one from the right seesaw to the trapdoor and one from the left seesaw to the whistle) most solvers are going to place the rope on the right seesaw to the whistle and call it a day. I can position the first seesaw up a little bit and the whistle down a little bit, as well as blocking one of the handles to a seesaw, rendering impossible that shortcut:


If I see a puzzle where a handle of a seesaw is blocked with a rope and hook, I have a very good feeling it's going to be a great puzzle, as it's the sign of someone who's thought deeply about possible shortcuts.

- Space bombs apart if you don't want them to go off simultaneously.

- Check cord lengths to make sure your solvers can't plug something in where they shouldn't be able to plug in.

- Check that the range of light isn't too far or else solvers will light things prematurely and get an easy win.

- Reminder: rope can be tied to dynamite.

- The bob-and-weaver can turn on light switches, move seesaws, and do a range of things you may not want done.

- Finally, all stationary objects can be used as "hard objects" where they are used to change the direction of moving objects instead of their intended function. In the balloon-popping example above where I shortcut the puzzle using the tennis ball on top of the small gear, the gear is used as a "hard object" as I never use it for its intended purpose to rotate but merely to change the diection of the ball from falling vertically to some movement to the left. Most stationary objects have corners, which are easy to institute this change in direction. You can also use this problem to your advantage and create puzzles where some stationary objects are merely used to deflect a ball.

To conclude, preventing shortcuts is very hard. I mess it up all the time. But if you want a great puzzle, it is an important aspect to consider. As you may have realized, more complicated puzzles will be a lot easier to shortcut. This is why I recommend making your puzzles as simple as possible as they will be more likely to retain their inherent difficulty.

A lot of good contributions to Contraption Maker aren't great ones because they leave little holes and gaps that shout in all caps PLACE THAT PART HERE. In this part I'll discuss how you can create a little ambiguity to mask your intentions.

I'll start with an example. Here I made a contraption where a balloon lifts up a bucket allowing the other bucket to lower. Usually I see an object go into a bucket to raise the other bucket. By doing the reverse, I've added a little twist that could make the puzzle interesting. The goal to this puzzle is "Get Tim home."


Imagine that this piece is part of a much larger puzzle. Which parts of the bucket lowering mechanism should I lock? Let's say I choose the buckets and the rope, but, remembering my earlier suggestion where I said to rarely provide pulleys I keep that locked. Now my puzzle looks like this:


I've drawn in the gigantic red arrows that appear in my mind the moment I see pulleys. Every pulley-bucket system I've seen has the buckets dangling right under the pulleys. So instantanously I know what to do. And so, that moment of creative innovation where I realize that I can pull a bucket down using a balloon is lost.

Contraption Maker puzzle composition is often about balance and circumstance. In this circumstance, it's far more interesting to give the pulleys as a part. I could also try to remove the pipes encasing the buckets, which also scream loudly that two buckets ought to be placed there. Doing so also happens to leave the balloon looking isolated, making it more of a confused piece to the puzzle instead of an obvious gesture of what to do next.


This edit itself makes the puzzle interesting and moderately difficult. Some adjustments would be needed to prevent shortcuts (the next step would be to find a way to use the dynamite to trigger access granted to the house) but already this puzzle feels like something substantial.

Another Example

Now that I've shown an easy example of how to avoid leading parts, here's a tricker one to resolve. Here's a mechanism that I've seen a few times in harder puzzles: using the rotational motion of the wrecking ball on a conveyer belt to lift a platform or a bucket. The object of this contraption is "Get Milton to his mouse hole."


Now how should I go about locking parts? Let's say I unlock practically everything I can without making the puzzle easy to shortcut. I'll give the conveyer belt, wrecking ball, hamster cage, and rope. I'll also update the conveyor belt type as I found ways to shortcut the puzzle with the red-wheel conveyer belt. Finally, through tests I found out that I can lower the ball bearing so that I can give the bucket as a part. Here's what I have as a puzzle:


I wrote in a red line where my eyes immediately go when I see this puzzle. That gap size is very distinctive. I see that gap size in many, many puzzles.

What can I do about it? There's a lot of situations where stepping-on-trigger is necessary, so I'm not saying don't ever leave gaps. So in this case, there's two things to try:

1. Have a second platform right next to the gap that the solver places, thus disguising slightly better these two parts.

2. Fill in the gap and try to enact the triggering mechanism elsewhere.

Let's try the first option. My first thought is going to be to try to delete part of the platform and then use a redundant part that can be placed as a platform. Of the parts I have, the most obvious one to choose is the conveyor belt. So now my puzzle looks like this:


Of course, that second conveyor belt is a dead giveaway since there's only one rotational source and one belt. I do want to say, though, that even this puzzle could fool some people for a small amount of time. It's pretty good as-is. Can we make it more interesting? What if there was a decoy route that might make some people think that you might need two conveyor belts in motion? Here's my approach. Use your creativity to come up with your own:


I added a decoy route to distract the solver from the main route. Going down and then back around doesn't work, however, as Waldo is too slow to follow Milton to the lower level. But I will wager many will try to have that path work anyways. This puzze right here is most definitely in the realm of moderately challenging. It is certainly no longer easy. The solver has to not merely create, with little indication, a contraption to lift the ball bearing but the solver must also not get distracted by the false route.

And so, a gap that at one point was obviously where the hamster wheel needs to be placed now becomes a junction to a false path.

Conclusion

The purpose of this section was to get you to think about how to avoid segments of puzzles that are leading. There are many configurations that are leading:

- Outlets without something that needs power, or vice versa

- Rotational devices not connected to objects that need rotational power or vice versa

- Obvious platforms to place cheese for Milton

- Obvious places to blow up (i.e. one little patch of brick on a map covered in pipe)

- Tunnels and passageways that are the perfect height for Tim.

When you see some one of these obvious indicators, try to add ambiguity to mask your intended direction with the rest of the puzzle's environment.