Puzzle Dependency Charts

This absolutely changed my perspective when it came to creating puzzles and branching narratives for my games.

When I first started IF, I looked at it more like a traditional piece of fiction. You make a general outline, start at the beginning, and work through to the end. I felt like I could just pick any node and keep writing, drafting long and winding passages for the player to move through. You can certainly do that, and many do.

Ron Gilbert, whose games I adored growing up, worked backward. He knew the end state, and the starting state, but worked backward. That has kept my puzzles and bottlenecks coherent.