Hi,
DISCLAIMER : This is only my personal opinion, there are many other equally as valid opinions.
You can write the solution as a linear set of steps but personally, I think that writing a puzzle dependency chart helped me with two. Check out (one of my other tools) vizon:
I build Vizon after reading the following article by Ron Gilberts:
https://grumpygamer.com/puzzle_dependency_charts
You know you have a frustrating game, if the chart will be a linear sequence of actions from top to bottom, you want your chart to be wide at the beginning (which means that multiple puzzles are open to be solved at most points during the game). The game may feature one or more choke points where you have to solve all of the pre-requisite puzzles to proceed onwards. In a simple game, the only choke point may be the end game condition. In larger games, there may be several choke points.
See the diagram for TWO's puzzles below...
At the beginning of the game, there are multiple actions that can be performed in any order. This means that if the player gets stuck on one thread of the game, they can make progress on another thread. In the diagram, I create events that are conditions (in green), user actions (in blue), and high level goals (in red).
(right click and open image in new tab to be able to see it full screen and zoom in) :
C
The way I see it, there are three levels of assistance you can give to a player outside the game, i.e. not including the in-game hints. These are:
1. Hints
2. Walkthrough
3. Solution
Hints are exactly that. They do not give you a solution to a puzzle, just some pointers to what to do and where to look to find the in-game hints. They are usually cryptic and I usually provide one or two red herrings to trap people that are cheating.
A walkthrough is a descriptive explanation of what to do with a suggested strategy, the preferred path through the puzzle tree, what to do, what to avoid, an explanation of various alternatives, an explanation of how the scoring works and so on.
A solution is a minimum path command-by-command solution with no elaboration.
For the game jam, I am considering providing coded hints for my game, but I don't think you should provide a walkthrough or a solution until the jam is over. If Adventuron was to request a walkthrough for the judges, then that's a different issue.
By all means, provide a "Have you tried?" section on the game page, but it is damn near impossible to write one of these without giving spoilers. You don't want people reading this or the walkthrough before they've even played the game.
