A method for logic/puzzle game design

[Jackolantern]

Intro:
The closing of Lucius's project, "Cubeway to Heaven" made me start to think a bit about designing logic (or puzzle) games. My experience is that they are extremely difficult to design. You want them to be complex enough to challenge a wide range of players, but not so complex that they leave in frustration with bad things to say about your game. And designing puzzles like these can be extremely hard in their own right because what may seem hard to you is easily toppled by someone who saw it from another angle.

Theory/Method:
I believe an easy way for indie developers to approach logic games is what I call "the foggy mirror design". This means that as you, the designer, create each puzzle, just the simple act of the pieces being added obscures its nature and creates the challenge. The player then undoes what you have done, with each piece advanced revealing more of the nature of the puzzle and guiding the next move (like a mirror losing the fog on it, with each small piece you see telling you much more about the reflection as a whole). Then the challenge can be broken down and analyzed metrically, such as "How many pieces did I add?", and "How many of those pieces interact?" Using those counts you can order the levels in difficulty. Theoretically, a puzzle with few pieces added or in play, with few of those pieces interacting in any meaningful way will be an easy puzzle. Of course this can't be an iron-clad law, so it still takes thorough play testing to balance.

Case Study:
An extremely clear example of this type of design is the mobile game Glow Artisan. The player is shown a group of blocks of several different colors at the top of the screen. They must then choose colors and make swipes to add the color to a play field. Colors mix to create more complex colors, and an eraser is there to delete in swipes lines of color already made. The complexity comes in laying the color swipes in the correct order to get the correct shades when mixed, and using the eraser to create the correct shapes out of those swipes. Like many games created with this methodology, it easily includes a level editor. Creating levels is simple, because all you are doing is acting like you are playing, but creating a free-form color/shape block. Almost no thought has to be made when developing a level, which is a far cry from designing most logic/puzzle games. Just the color swipes being added closes the player's view on how it was made, thus creating the challenge of the individual puzzle. You can get a general feel of how hard the puzzle is simply by counting how many swipes of color you made, and in how many places each one overlaps, creating a blended color. This could of course be applied to many different types of games; even games not typically considered logic or puzzle games, although it will take more abstraction.

Closing:
That is basically it. I just wanted to get this out of my head, and it is probably a method other people have thought about as well. If you can design logic/puzzle games so that simply putting pieces into the play field creates the challenge, you will likely have an infinitely easier time creating the content for your game. That could be important considering how much content is expected these days in a logic/puzzle game to make a game engrossing. It could also allow players to create and share their own puzzles very easily, with almost no training or forethought, expanding the game's replayability almost infinitely.