AI logic puzzle maker: the rule is small, the consequences are not

The great logic puzzle games have a mechanic you could explain in one sentence. Boxes can be pushed but not pulled. Time rewinds and you meet yourself. Colour determines what you can stand on. That is the entire rule set.

What follows is the design, and the design is finding the situations where that rule does something surprising. That is a search problem carried out by a person, and it is slow, and it does not compress.

Which means the implementation should be nearly free, and traditionally it is not. Grid movement with correct edge cases, undo that actually restores everything, state that rewinds cleanly — these are fiddly and they consume the exact energy you needed for puzzle design.

You describe the mechanic to Director 1 and it writes the GDScript into your Godot project. "The player moves on a grid, can push one block at a time but never pull, and pushing into another block does nothing."

Then the parts you would have forgotten: undo that steps back through every change, a reset key, a move counter, a solved state. Say you want them and they exist.

Undo in particular is worth calling out. In a puzzle game it is not a convenience, it is the primary verb — players undo far more than they move — and a subtly wrong undo makes a good puzzle feel broken.

You lay out levels in the builder, by hand. Nothing generates a good puzzle, because a good puzzle is a piece of misdirection aimed at a person, and the aiming is the craft.

The reliable method is boring and works: build a situation, solve it yourself, then find out whether it teaches. Every puzzle should introduce one idea, and the puzzle after it should assume you learned it. When you find yourself explaining a level in words, the level is not doing its job.

Order matters as much as content. The same twenty puzzles in a different sequence are a different game, and often the difference between people finishing and people quitting at level six.

You cannot judge the difficulty of a puzzle you designed. You know the answer, permanently, and there is no way back to not knowing it.

So the only instrument is someone else playing while you say nothing, which is uncomfortable and necessary. Watch where they stall. Half of what you thought was elegant is invisible.

The game runs locally on the bundled Godot, so handing it to someone on a laptop needs no connection and no setup.

Stage Engine is a desktop app for Mac and Windows with Godot inside it. It is built around 3D, which for this genre is an opportunity — spatial logic puzzles are less crowded ground than grid ones — but 2D works too, since Godot does both.

Building needs an internet connection. Free download and free plan; Indie is $10 a month, Pro is $50.

Two puzzle games with identical mechanics can feel completely different depending on what the pieces are. Blocks and grids read as an exercise. A room, a light and a door read as a place.

Since the world is built by hand here and the engine is 3D, dressing a puzzle as somewhere real is cheap, and it changes how long people are willing to sit with a hard one.

It also affects how a rule is understood. A mechanic explained by what the objects obviously are needs no tutorial text, and tutorial text in a puzzle game is nearly always a sign the level failed.