Wow! such a creative and well polished puzzle. Had me playing the most out of all the other games I've played this jam. Must have been very difficult and brain scratching to come up with these puzzles haha. Also liked how the mechanics were introduced, very intuitive!
Viewing post in I Want to Hold Hands jam comments
I was just asking some friends how they can come up with complex puzzles like this, after creating all the systems. I thought your puzzles were very impressive with how interconnected they were, but seemed to only have one correct solution. Do you have any tips on how you approach level creation for puzzle games? Less about the mechanics, more about making an individual puzzle with only one solution - I end up spending a whole lot of time guessing until something works.
I'm no expert so I don't know if my tips will help but I'll try.
First I try to have a theme to each level, by making each one unique (could be a new mechanic, a unique situation with the same mechanics, or even a new visual element). This helps me introducing new mechanics slowly while keeping everything fresh from the player's standpoint. Ideally it's something I can summarize in a short sentence. For instance for this game I have levels with the themes "Teach the player that someone can have 6 arms" (new mechanic), "Have more characters than before do a party" (Visual element + difficulty increase), "There are only people with 6 arms" (unique situation + remind the player that 2 same people can't hold hands more than once + funny visual situation). If a level has multiple purposes it's even better! But yeah in general if can't summarize a level with a sentence by saying what's unique about it (doesn't have to be groundbreaking), then maybe the level doesn't need to exist? I would say that is my main tip when designing levels.
Then, to go in specifics, I don't have a lot of experience in level design so I can't speak a lot from previous projects, but for this game I started designing each puzzle from an intended solution I had in mind (a graph of all the arms connection I wanted) and then chose the color, name, hats and requests of each character according to this solution, while volontarily making some information ambiguous (for instance a character requiring to hold the hand of someone with a hat is far less specific than one directly requiring the name of the specific person). But at the end of the day most puzzles of this game have several (often similar) solutions, and like you I do need to test the levels over and over to know if they are truly fun, and make corrections to improve them (or throw them away) if it doesn't.
Sorry for the long reply, I hope it answered your question and can be of some help.