The Secret Lives of Games 124: Thinking Inside the Box with Patrick Traynor (Patrick's Parabox)
Oct 7, 2023
Join game designer Patrick Traynor, creator of the acclaimed recursive puzzle game Patrick's Parabox. He dives into the journey of developing recursive mechanics and the decision-making behind commercializing the game after college. Traynor shares insights on fostering approachability in puzzle design, the importance of playtesting, and the influence of the Sokoban community. With a focus on elegance over excessive difficulty, he emphasizes making puzzles satisfying and accessible for a wider audience, all while highlighting artistic collaboration and iterative design.
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Recursion As A Rich Core Mechanic
- Patrick Traynor built the game around a core recursive rule: boxes can contain worlds that contain boxes, including copies of themselves.
- That single mechanic creates a wide space of surprising behaviors and design possibilities to explore.
Prototype Dormant Then Rediscovered
- Patrick prototyped a simpler box-pushing recursion in 2014 then shelved it and revisited it in 2018 for a college club demo.
- Expanding support to arbitrary layers and adding enter/exit mechanics revealed the game's commercial potential.
Iterate Level Order With Playtests
- Iterate level ordering constantly and test layouts with players to catch pacing and intuition problems early.
- Move mechanics earlier or later when playtests show them as confusing or unexciting in context.