The player's goal in Time Heist is to collect information that will be used to delete the blackmail the company holds over them. As these pieces of information would be stored around the entire map, it was important that all puzzles felt intertwined and intersected with one another. I developed a system for puzzle design that left room for expansion of new puzzles.

I would start with the correct path to solving a puzzle. This would be a multistep process that included collecting items and info, parts that I called "sub puzzles". I would scatter these sub puzzles across the map in places that felt natural - maybe you find this document in a 2nd floor meeting room. This room now became a location that I could use in the future to place sub puzzles for a different puzzle entirely. Essentially, all puzzles that contain a sub puzzle in that room are now blocked by the player going into that room first.

I then moved on to building the players assumption on how to solve the puzzle. Based on where the puzzle existed in the map, I would use the puzzles prerequisites to discover what the player already knows and build a proper assumption around that, something that the actual solution subverts.

A problem I ran into was the density of puzzles in a location. Some places would feel packed with info while others would be too sparse. To avoid this, I made sub puzzles less dependent on their locations and more on what information or item they unlock. This would allow for quick iteration by moving parts around.