This talk covers game design challenges and solutions from the development of the award-winning recursive puzzle game Patrick's Parabox, which was released in 2022 and has 3500+ Steam reviews with a 99% positive review ratio. The talk covers how the core mechanics of the game were initially discovered, how the puzzle rules and level design evolved over the course of the game's 4 year development, and various unique design dilemmas encountered and solved along the way. The talk also touches on puzzle level design philosophy, how to distill and refine puzzles and puzzle sequences, and iterating on level design based on playtesting. The talk also shows how a few unique recursive systems are programmed. And the talk presents a design philosophy of optimizing for best presenting a core mechanic and surfacing joyful moments to players.

The target audience is any kind of game developer or designer interested in seeing some unique design challenges that were faced by an independent puzzle game, and the solutions to these problems. Anyone who finds it interesting seeing unexpected problems, surprises, challenges, solutions, and philosophies regarding the development of a cerebral puzzle game. The talk also explains the developer's perspective on puzzle level design, exploring surprising consequences of rulesets, and presenting joyful moments to players resulting from that ruleset.