“A lot of puzzle games can leave you staring at the same static screen for ages, but here, I’m always pushing you forward,” says Mark Brown of Game Maker’s Toolkit. For a decade now, Brown has been releasing accessible deep dives on game design for his popular YouTube channel, like “How Game Designers Protect Players From Themselves” and “The Two Types of Random in Game Design.” This week, he’s releasing his own for the first time.
Puzzler Mind Over Magnet is, Brown says, about “the thrill of riding up electromagnetic beams, tossing magnets around the room, experimenting with the two different polarities, and switching between them to navigate in creative ways. You’re constantly going from room to room, and I’m always introducing new ideas, toys, and mechanics, so the game moves along at a good pace.”
After spending so long breaking down what works in other games, designing your own feels like a recipe for analysis paralysis. For this one, “the main inspiration actually came from the magnetic glove item in one of the Zelda games on Game Boy. In that game, Link could attract and repel from metallic objects, which I thought could make for a fresh mechanic in a fast-paced platformer, like Celeste”.
“But while prototyping, an interesting evolution happened,” says Brown. “Initially, the character was magnetic and could change polarity to attract or repel towards objects directly. But while messing around in Unity I ended up splitting the concept in two: so now your character isn’t magnetic, but you can pick up a giant horseshoe magnet and, while holding it, you’d attract towards metallic objects”. This opened up a lot of creative possibilities. “Now, you can throw the magnet around, or release it mid-air to propel yourself up. But most significantly it lent itself to puzzles, where you can leave the magnet in one place and operate it at a distance. The game had to stop being like Celeste, and operate more like Braid or Limbo.”
After spending so long analysing design, were there any preconceptions Brown had that turned out to be counter-intuitive in practice, at least for this project? It turns out that some of the most crucial elements were those he’d barely considered as important. “Stuff I didn’t fully take in, even though I’ve spent like 15 years in the press and on YouTube. I didn’t anticipate just how crucial playtesting would be. Having people play the game from an early stage, giving feedback, and observing their assumptions and mistakes has been eye-opening. It’s amazing how much this process reveals about both the game and the designer’s own blind spots.”
“I think gamers might sometimes give playtesting a bad rap – that it leads to dumbed-down games, or bland stuff. I’ve probably said that in the past. But when used well it’s just utterly essential to making a game that isn’t a completely incomprehensible mess.”
Another major realisation was the importance of production – deadlines, planning, and scheduling. “I started to think of it like this: If you’re a weak programmer, the game might have bugs; if you’re a weak artist, it might be ugly; if you’re a weak designer, the game won’t be fun. But if you lack solid production, the game simply won’t exist. It will just never come out.”
Another “small, dumb realisation” Brown had was a new perspective on puzzles that allow the player to get stuck and reset, which he used to think was poor design. “But now I know it’s incredibly difficult to make puzzles where players can’t get stuck—and yes, there are puzzles like that in Mind Over Magnet. I definitely have more empathy now for other designers on that front. Though hats off to Valve, because it’s almost impossible to get stuck in Portal without the player doing something really dumb.”
Despite the years of identifying design approaches across different genres, Brown says that there “aren’t as many clear templates to follow” when it comes to puzzle design. “With platformers, you can look to how Nintendo crafts levels, or with shooters, you might draw on enemy archetypes from games like Doom. But with puzzle games, there’s less of a roadmap. I’ve even talked to experienced puzzle game designers, asking for their techniques, and many of them struggled to give a concrete template or formula.”
There were, says Brown, definitely some techniques he found useful, but it was mostly a process of time, effort, and constant iteration. “Playtesting is key, as is the willingness to throw out countless ideas that seem great in theory but don’t work in practice. There are probably as many levels on the cutting room floor as actually ended up in the final game.”
That playtesting feedback was “endlessly surprising and eye-opening from start to finish. It’s amazing how differently someone new to the game sees it compared to me, as the developer, who knows every detail of the code and design. As the creator, you carry so much built-up knowledge and context that it’s easy to overlook how someone fresh to the game might interpret things.”
“For instance, playtesting revealed issues with puzzle difficulty, the clarity of certain mechanics, and even simple visual cues. In one build, there was a screen in the background that players thought was a platform they could stand on—an interpretation that had never occurred to me.” Seasoned players also bring assumptions from other games with them. “My game has those one-way platforms you get in Mario and Smash Bros, where you can jump up and pass through from underneath. This is pretty intuitive for experienced players, but newcomers often found it confusing and illogical.”
“Finally, there were little things I hadn’t thought players would care about,” he continues. “For instance, initially, when the character left a level, the magnet didn’t follow; it would just appear in the next area. I didn’t think twice about it, but nearly every playtester commented on how jarring and confusing it was for the magnet to simply teleport between rooms. So, I added a system where the magnet gets sucked through a big pipe and lands in the next level alongside the character.”
There is a story in Mind Over Magnet – your little screen-on-a-wheel is escaping a factory – but Brown says he ultimately wanted to keep the focus on the puzzles (“I’m a terrible writer”), while still keeping some personality. “I was probably inspired by how Nintendo often gives its central mechanics a face, name, and character, like Navi in Zelda or Cappy in Mario Odyssey. So rather than having the magnets just be objects that you throw around, I made them into little companions with personalities. I sprinkled in little character moments throughout the levels. So you’ll see these speech bubbles where the magnets react or give you hints. Some of these moments are like little Easter eggs that not every player will encounter – it’s tied to you doing something weird, or solving the puzzle in an unorthodox way.”
Of course, before the interview ends, I have to ask the most important question. “You know,” Brown says, “I probably should have looked this up before I started working on a game about magnets because I don’t know how magnets work and that is obviously in Mind Over Magnet. The way magnets work in my game is completely fictional and does not have any relation to real world physics. The whole game is based around magnets with only one pole, which simply don’t exist in the universe. And while magnets do attract towards opposite poles, like in real life, there’s an option in the settings to change this if you find that too confusing.”
“Funnily enough this is totally one of those things that playtesters could potentially get angry about. And I have had a few comments from perhaps more science minded people who have found that aspect frustrating. But luckily most people kind of leave their real world expectations at the door and don’t question weird physics in games, which is pretty fortunate for me.”
If you’re not utterly disgusted by this flagrant disregard for physics, you can find Mind Over Magnet on Steam here – it’s out this Wednesday, the 13th of November.