For our 2024 series of interviews, we wanted to hear from puzzle creators about their design process, with a focus on what they learned about making a specific puzzle. Read on for our interview with puzzle game designer Mairi Nolan.

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I originally got started writing and designing murder mysteries—you know the kind where everyone has a role to play and must work together to figure out who among them is the killer. Now I’m much more comfortable rooted in the “puzzle” genre. Individuals, companies and clients come to me with an idea, and it doesn’t matter if it’s a video game, or an outdoor puzzle trail, or an immersive theatre experience. What I do with the idea is I make it a puzzle experience. I add little injections of puzzle threads, and delightful aha moments for the players to figure out, which gates how they progress through their experience. Haha, that’s a lot of words to say “I make puzzles”.

Have you done EnigMarch before?

Yes, this will be my third year taking part in EnigMarch! Annoyingly the last two years coincided with trips where I didn’t have my laptop with me, so whilst I had big plans, a lot of my previous EnigMarch puzzles ended up being scribbled in notebooks here and there—but hey, that’s a totally valid way to take part in EnigMarch too! EnigMarch is all about challenging people to think differently about their approach to designing a puzzle, and since I spend every other moment of my life on a computer, being “offline” was a fun puzzle-making challenge.

With this year’s EnigMarch, I plan to have a running theme throughout the whole series—I’d love to use some of the puzzles I design in my letter-delivering game, so I’ll try to design the type of puzzles which might be contained on a single piece of letter paper. Well, that’s the idea anyway! We’ll see how it goes.

Could you walk us through the design process of a specific puzzle you’ve made?

Sure thing! So one of the puzzles that comes to mind, and is relevant to EnigMarch too, is that a couple of years ago I was in charge of coming up with a mini puzzle game for Halloween that took place across social media accounts. Although the company doesn’t operate anymore, the puzzle may even still be “working” if you head to the start point here.

The challenge was to create a month-long puzzle experience that took place entirely over Instagram. I could use whatever tools were available to me within Instagram, such as the image, descriptions, video content, multiple accounts, tags, and so on. It had to be engaging, it had to take a certain length of time to complete, and it had to take players on a mysterious journey that would end in a unique prize.

To design the experience, I started with key milestones I wanted my players to hit. I then wrote what sort of a story I wanted the players to go through. What would they encounter, what feelings did I want it to evoke. Then, last but not least, I dove into the puzzles. I had the advantage that certain posts could be posted at certain times on hidden accounts to “gate” the players, but primarily I wanted the puzzles themselves to be the gates to the players’ experience.

One of my favourite moments in creating this puzzle experience was seeing how we could use video. For example, disguising a video as a photo that, once you stare at it long enough, would move subtly. It allowed me to write in some lore copy about “looking deep” and then give a moment of delight to the player once they realised what was happening.

I appreciate this doesn’t entirely explain the puzzle-making process—but I’m hoping not to spoil anything too much just in case the experience does still work! The key takeaway for me however was designing a puzzle to fit within the constraints of social media. This reminds me of EnigMarch, because we are encouraged to post our puzzles on social media, so that’s one of the constraints designers may wish to consider!

Do you have any thoughts you want to leave people with about making puzzles?

Honestly, it just comes down to one thing: Just get out there and make puzzles, even if they’re not great. I think that’s the number one thing a designer can do to hone their craft. Everyone starts from nothing, even the people out there making your absolute favourite puzzles. Their first puzzles were probably terrible. At least, mine were. Cringing over old work never gets old!

In any case, EnigMarch is the perfect stage to practise that. You’re challenged to come up with a puzzle with a random prompt, and it’s entirely up to you if you want to post it or not. There’s a really supportive community in EnigMarch who will test your puzzles and offer feedback if you like.

So that’s my closing thought! Just make something, because making something is better than making nothing.

Where can people find your work?

My portfolio can be found at www.mairispaceship.com, which covers just about all the work I’m allowed to talk about publicly. So, minus all the juicy projects under NDA! More practically speaking, a lot of games I’ve worked on can be found on the shelves of board game shops or through the doors of escape rooms around the world. So who knows, you may have already played something I worked on before!